Katarina sat alone with the cold tea and the beautiful contract for a long time.
The festival kept going outside. Somebody was playing a flute badly near the harbor stairs, and a crowd was cheering for them anyway. Katarina inhaled slowly.
[Okay. What do I actually know?]
She pulled the Ledger up in her mind and started filing.
Fact one:
Drava's paper was failing. Corvani had said it herself, out loud, in a formal reciprocal audit, with the session record open on the table between them. Katarina had watched the recording stone glow the entire meeting. Assessors recorded everything.
[She confessed her house's collapse into an official audit record. Why would she do that?]
Because Corvani expected only two outcomes. Katarina signs, and the record belongs to Drava's new subsidiary, buried forever. Or Katarina refuses, gets crushed by tonight, and the record belongs to a ruined provincial house nobody will ever listen to.
