Page 73 of Shadow Burn

The original.

Her breath caught.

Why?

The question cut through the panic. Katherine’s mind steadied. Fear still pounded through her, but beneath it, her training rose up, stubborn and automatic.

Originals mattered because originals carried provenance. Ink. Paper. Pressure. Chain of custody. A copy could preserve words, but certain papers told the story of where those words had been born.

She kissed Priss on the head, pushed to her feet, and went to the door. She needed the Vance papers. When she opened the door, Sebastian turned immediately. “Everything okay?”

Katherine hated how easy the lie came when it was wrapped in truth. “I need to check one of the Vance documents in Jasper’s office.”

His expression didn’t change. “Now?”

“Now.” She kept her voice steady. “The gate shooting made something click. There’s a note I need to look at again before I forget the connection.”

Sebastian studied her for a moment, and Katherine felt every beat of her pulse in her throat. He didn’t know her well enough to read the lie beneath the truth. Jasper would have. Jasper would’ve looked at her for two seconds and known she was holding something back.

“Okay,” Sebastian said. “Let’s go.”

She nodded and stepped into the hall, leaving her phone on the nightstand.

The compound was still buzzing. Voices moved behind closed doors. Somewhere, a printer hummed. Rain tapped against the windows now, soft but steady, turning the glass black. Sebastian walked beside her without crowding, alert but not suspicious. The cracked-open door to the conference room revealed Garrett and Detective Mallory deep in conversation with Mack and Jasper.

She kept walking. At Jasper’s office, the biometric lock clicked softly, and Sebastian remained in the hall while she stepped inside. “I’ll be right here,” he said.

“Thank you.”

The door closed.

Katherine stood alone in Jasper’s office with the Vance boxes, the monitors, the smell of coffee and leather and him. For one terrible second, the weight of what she was doing pressed so hard against her ribs she couldn’t move.

Then she saw her logbook on the desk. Caldwell—interim review, asset D? Cinder risk not closed.

She crossed the room and opened the box she’d been working from before Jasper had dragged her to the ping-pong table. Her hands moved carefully despite the tremor in them. Folder. Sleeve. Letter. Marginal note. She found the page exactly where she’d left it, flattened beneath an archival weight, the faded ink still stubbornly visible beside Vance’s neat handwriting.

Discretionary containment pending final historical determination.

The sentence glared back at her, bland and unyielding.

Katherine whispered it under her breath. “Discretionary containment pending final historical determination.”

Vance, like all CIA officers, used bureaucratic language when he had to, but even his euphemisms had logic. This sentence had always snagged in her mind because it carried the rhythm of policy without the meaning of policy.

It wasn’t a sentence—it was a container.

Her gaze snapped to the stack of documents she’d marked earlier with yellow tabs, the ones she’d set aside because they used similarly strange phrasing. One of them had looked like an internal glossary for classification review.

Her fingers moved faster now. She found the page in a folder marked Historical Review Terminology—Supplemental Notes.

Only now that she was looking at it with panic burning away exhaustion, it didn’t read like a glossary. It read like a key.

DISCRETIONARY: non-attributable

CONTAINMENT: lethal action

HISTORICAL: no official file