“We cannot sell it,” he said. “We will expose it.”
Mikke — the child — was brave in the way that made people keep secrets from walls. She watched Kyou as if inspecting a coin for gold. “Why’d they kick you out?”
“I don’t need them to,” Kyou said. “I need them to be loud enough to be seen.” raw chapter 461 yuusha party o oida sareta kiyou binbou free
Kyou could have lied. He could have said treachery, or fate, or a villain of impossible scale. Instead he let the truth be small and jagged. “We failed a contract. We had to leave a town. People always make bigger stories than the truth.”
Maren’s office smelled of dust and paper shavings. She was smaller than he expected and moved with the sort of precise calm that belonged to people who had never been young. Her hair was conservative, her eyes were not. When she looked at him, it was as if she were lifting the corners of the world to see what tucked inside. “We cannot sell it,” he said
The mourning woman’s eyes did not soften. The pages behind her turned on their own, like the wind moving through a forest of names. The faces looked at Kyou with a patience that felt like a sentence.
Kyou’s fingers tightened until the leather creaked. He looked at the faces again, and for the first time since his exile, something doubled inside him: fury and the taste of plan. “Why’d they kick you out
Sael hesitated. He was a man split between conscience and advantage. Then he did something Kyou would never have expected: he handed Kyou a small key. “For the central registry,” he said. “It’s a gesture. I won’t open the ledger you have, but I can make sure the right people see copies. If you destroy the original after this, I swear — I’ll forget it.”
