As Jacob looked at the varied expressions of the representatives from the pure-blood families, his heart sank rapidly.
The attack on Corban had laid bare the fragility of the Pure-blood Alliance. There was no real trust between its members.
An alliance brought together purely by self-interest could fall apart over those same interests at any moment.
Now, the traitor among the nine of them had only made a few small moves, yet the Pure-blood Alliance was already splintering from within, its members suspecting one another.
Jacob could only hope that the ghosts they had sent out would find Voldemort and establish contact as soon as possible.
Fortunately, although this incident had caused a crisis of trust, it had also convinced Jacob that both Lucius and Corban were trustworthy.
As he had reasoned, if Lucius were the traitor, they would all have been rounded up long ago. They could never have been sitting here unharmed.
If Corban were the traitor, there would have been no need to make the staged attack real and let himself be injured so badly.
Lucius had also thought of something else: Sirius's attack might not have been aimed solely at the Pure-blood Alliance. He might also have wanted to expose the truth about what had happened all those years ago and clear his name.
That was why Vaughn had deliberately selected Corban as the target and arranged for Rita Skeeter to be there in advance. Sirius would steer Corban into admitting the truth, which Rita Skeeter would then reveal to the public.
If everything went smoothly, they could even accuse Corban of concealing crucial information about Voldemort. But Corban had handled it cleverly, defusing the crisis by hinting that he was bound by an Unbreakable Vow. Vaughn probably had not obtained much information from the informer,