Seraphine sent word to Cassius at ten.
His response came back in twenty minutes. Which was itself information.....a man who took twenty minutes to respond to a request from Seraphine was a man who had been expecting the request and had already decided his answer.
He'd see her at noon.
His territory. His rooms.
Eve spent the two hours between in Seraphine's study going over everything Seraphine had on him. Not his public record....she'd read that already. The texture of him. How he operated. What he'd built.
Cassius had run the Merchant faction for thirty years. Had tripled their Court influence in that time not through political maneuvering but through making himself structurally necessary. His faction controlled the financial infrastructure of the Court....banking, trade agreements, the movement of resources between supernatural communities across four continents.
He didn't need the throne.
He needed the throne to need him.
