Irina’s POV

I waited until the palace went quiet.

That quiet came around midnight.

I pulled the cloak tighter around my shoulders and stepped out of the room.

The hood was up. I kept my head down. The two guards at the end of the east corridor saw me coming and straightened — and then, when I didn’t stop, they exchanged a look and let me pass. I was the king’s marked mate. Even unconscious and bleeding in a hospital bed, Nicholas cast a shadow long enough to cover me.

The holding block was three levels below ground.

The air changed as I descended — colder, staler, the smell of stone and something older underneath. The lights down here were fluorescent and merciless, the kind that made everything look slightly wrong. My footsteps echoed. I hated how loud they were.

There was one guard outside the holding room. He was young, looked like he’d pulled the short straw for the overnight shift. He saw me coming and stood up straighter.

"Ma’am—"

"I need five minutes," I said.

He hesitated. His hand moved toward his earpiece.

"Don’t," I said. "Five minutes. Then I leave. No one needs to know."

He looked at me. I looked back at him, steady, and waited.

He stepped aside.

---

The door was heavy. Metal, no window. I pushed it open and stepped inside.

The room was small. A single overhead light. A chair bolted to the floor, and Alexei sitting in it, wrists cuffped to the armrests. He was still wearing the clothes from the fight — dirty, torn at the shoulder, one side of his face bruised dark from cheekbone to jaw.

He looked up when I came in.

For exactly one second, something moved across his face. Something almost like surprise.

Then I reached up and pushed the hood back.

The surprise curdled instantly into something else. His mouth split into a grin — wide, wet, ugly — and the laugh that came out of him was short and sharp, like a bark.

"Oh, *this* is good." He leaned back as far as the restraints allowed. "They sent *you*. Of all the people they could have sent, they sent the broken little omega who can’t even—"

"No one sent me," I said.

"—who can’t even shift." He kept going like I hadn’t spoken. His eyes traveled over me, slow and deliberate, and he let the silence stretch just long enough to make it feel like an inspection. "Look at you. You look like garbage. You always looked like garbage, even back home, but now you’re wearing their fancy clothes and standing in their fancy dungeon and you still look like something someone scraped off the bottom of a boot."

I didn’t say anything.

"What happened to your king, Irina?" His voice dropped into something mocking. "Oh, right. He’s dying. He’s lying upstairs right now, rotting from whatever poison got into him, and rumor has it someone made it worse." He tilted his head. "That was you, wasn’t it? His own mate." He made a sound low in his throat. "Even the moon goddess gave up on you."

I let him finish.

"Where’s the antidote," I said.

He blinked. Then he laughed again — longer this time, delighted, like I’d said something genuinely funny.

"That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?" He shook his head slowly.

"The antidote," I said again. "Where is it."

"There isn’t one." He smiled at me. "Not the way you’re thinking."

Something in my chest went very still.

"What does that mean."

"It means—" He paused, savoring it. Actually savoring it, like it was something he’d been holding onto and was finally getting to open. "—the cure is you, sweetheart. It’s been you this entire time. And you’ve been running around this palace like a headless chicken, watching him deteriorate, and you never once figured it out." He let out a slow breath. "Honestly, it’s almost impressive. The obliviousness."

I stared at him.

"Me."

"Your blood." He said it like it was obvious. Like I was slow. "You have healer blood."

The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago.

"You’re a Healer Queen’s daughter. Direct bloodline." He met my eyes. "Your mother wasn’t Iron Thorn. She was never Iron Thorn."

The words landed wrong.

"My mother—"

"Was taken." He said it flatly. "Our precious father — Mikhail, the great and honorable beta — he found her, and he *took* her. Locked her up. Got her pregnant." He shrugged, like this was a minor detail. Like this was the most unremarkable thing he’d ever said. "The Healing Tribe’s queen. The last white wolf of her line. He kept her just long enough to produce you, and then she died, and he buried the whole story and never told anyone." He tilted his head. "Didn’t know that, did you."

I wasn’t breathing.

I realized I’d stopped, and I made myself start again. One breath. Two.

I looked up at him.

He was watching me with that same flat smile, and I hated him — hated him the way I’d hated him for years, hated the particular comfortable cruelty of someone who’d always had an audience to perform for and was so used to it he did it even in chains in a basement room with only me to watch.

But I had what I came for.

I pulled the hood back up.

Alexei stared at me.

Then he started laughing.

It wasn’t the sharp bark from before. This was something different — high and unraveling, a sound that bounced off the low ceiling and the metal walls and came back wrong. He laughed like something had come loose inside him, like the punchline was funnier than he’d expected.

I was already at the door.

"Irina."

I stopped.

I don’t know why I stopped. I should have kept walking.

"Irina." His voice was still shaking with laughter but there was something underneath it now. Something with teeth. "You think you’re walking out of here with that little secret all to yourself? You think this is *over*?"

I turned around.

He was grinning at me. His bruised face, his cuffed hands, the blood still dried in the corner of his lip — and that grin, that same grin from when we were children, the one that always meant something bad was about to happen.

"I’m going to tell them." He said it slowly. Clearly. Like he wanted to make sure every syllable reached me. "I’m going to tell every single person in this palace. I’ll tell them exactly what happened — how Irina went to see her mate, how Irina nearly killed your mate." He leaned forward as far as the chains allowed. "I’ll make sure the whole world knows it was *you* who almost put their Alpha in the ground."