AMARIS

She looked like a fiery goddess.

That was the first thing that crossed my mind when Alpha Corvin walked in with her on his arm. He didn’t have to introduce her. The collective gasp that moved through the room and the way both twins came up out of their chairs like the floor had caught fire told me everything I needed to know.

Freya.

Red hair like a struck match, a face that did not look like it belonged among regular people, the kind of beauty that made you want to either worship it or set it on fire just to even the odds between you. I sat at the front of the room in my floral dress and my pointless little veil and looked at her and thought, well. Of course. Of course she looks like that.

I had pictured her a hundred times since Rowan told me she was alive, and somehow every single version I’d imagined had still undersold her. She was divine, magnificent and carried herself with so much grace.

Despite the countless faces scowling at her she still had her head held high and she was staring at every one of them dead in the eyes.

Such a queen, I stan.

But the real question sitting in my chest had nothing to do with her hair.

Why, in the goddess’s name, was Corvin parading her into a boardroom roughly forty minutes after he had legally mated me?

A bold choice. A man of vision.

I told myself I would not react. Whatever this was, whatever performance was about to unfold in this room at three in the morning, I would sit here with my hands folded and my face arranged into nothing and give absolutely no one the satisfaction of watching it land on me. I had years of practice keeping my face still in Stormshadow. I could manage one more night.

Freya’s eyes found mine across the room and she gave me a small, curt smile.

I did not give it back.

I held her gaze for exactly one beat, let her see a whole lot of nothing, and looked away first, because looking away first was a choice and being made to look away was not, and I was very done being made to do things tonight.

Corvin moved to the center of the raised platform.

Every head in the room turned to follow him. The two sentinels posted behind the twins shifted their weight and fixed hard stares at the backs of their heads. Ryker had his fist clenched so tight against the table that the knuckles had gone white, his whole body strung like a wire holding back something that very badly wanted to come through it. Rowan, who I had never once seen lose his composure, was sitting with his jaw locked and his breathing too careful, holding himself together with what looked like real effort.

Corvin glanced at Freya one last time. He did not glance at me at all.

"For the past year," he began, his voice carrying flat and even across the silent room, "I have said nothing about what happened the day Luna Zoya died."

The room went so still I could hear a chair creak two seats down from me.

"I allowed the rumor that I killed her to stand. I let it spread, and I let it settle, because some part of me blamed myself for what happened that night."

He exhaled. His eyes moved to Ryker.

"But I am here tonight to tell every one of you that I did not kill her."

Ryker came halfway out of his seat before the sentinel’s hand slammed down on his shoulder and forced him back into it.

"You monster." His voice tore out of him, low and shaking and barely held together. "I saw you that night. I saw her gasping for her life in your arms."

"Did you see me put the knife in her?" Corvin’s voice did not rise even slightly.

Ryker’s jaw flexed. "You were the only one there."

I looked between the two of them and felt the hatred running back and forth across that room like a live wire someone had dropped in water, this resentment that had been building for a year and was only now finding somewhere to go. I had walked into a lot of tense rooms in my life. This one had its own special flavor of awful.

"Ryker." Corvin took a step toward the edge of the platform. "Why were you asleep when your mother died in your room? It was barely past midnight."

Ryker said nothing.

"Everyone who had dinner with us that night was asleep at the same hour. All of them. Why is that?"

Ryker’s eyes flicked sideways to his brother, then back to his father. "I don’t know."

Corvin turned his attention to Rowan. "Do you remember falling asleep that night?"

Rowan was quiet for a moment, and when he answered it came out so low I almost lost it under the hum of the room. "No. I don’t."

I sat forward an inch without meaning to. Something was moving under the surface of all this, I couldn’t make out yet, and despite myself, despite every single reason I had to stay locked safely behind my neutral face, I wanted to know where he was taking it.

"Marco." Corvin didn’t turn his head. "The records from that night. How many attended the dinner, and how many of them were awake when Luna Zoya died."

Beta Marco rose from his chair. "Only five people were awake, Alpha."

A murmur stirred through the room and died fast under the weight of his voice.

Corvin kept his eyes fixed on his sons but pitched the question to Marco. "Who were the five?"

Marco’s gaze swept the room once, slow, like he already knew exactly how this was going to land on everyone in it. "Luna Zoya. Yourself, though you were barely conscious. Freya. Nia. And Cole."

The room gasped.

I looked at Corvin and tried to do the arithmetic his way, tried to see the picture he was building piece by piece in front of thirty exhausted, half-drunk people, and I couldn’t get there yet. Where was he going? Why those five names. My eyes slid to Freya, standing off to the side with her arms folded and her chin level, watching him work like she had sat through this story before and knew every beat of it.

"Why were Freya, Nia, and Cole awake," Corvin said, "when no one else in this house was."

Marco hesitated. "I can’t say for certain, Alpha. But I believe it had to do with their wolves. Both Nia and Cole carry weak wolves. And in Freya’s case—" he paused, choosing it carefully "—the absence of one entirely."

Ryker made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. "So that’s what this is." He strained forward against the sentinel’s grip on his shoulder. "You hauled us all out of our beds at three in the morning to hand us sleep statistics." His mouth twisted. "And by your own numbers, you were awake too. So tell me how any of this exonerates you from what you did to her."

"It doesn’t." Corvin said it plainly, without flinching away from it. "Not yet. But ask yourself the real question, Ryker. Why were that many people unconscious at the exact same hour, on the exact same night. Does that sound like a coincidence to you."

He let it hang in the air a moment.

"No," he answered himself, quietly. "It does not."

He turned then, away from the twins, and faced the whole room, and I watched every person in it lean toward him a fraction without realizing they were doing it. Even me. Even with everything I was holding back, I leaned.

"They were all asleep," he said, "because they had been drugged."

The gasp that went through the room was louder this time, sharper. A council elder near me pressed a flat hand to his chest. The nobles along the wall turned to one another, their mouths moving fast. I kept my hands folded in my lap and my spine straight and my face exactly where I’d put it, but underneath all of that, every part of me had gone quiet and sharp and was listening hard.

Corvin waited for the noise to settle back down.

"Luna Zoya drugged everyone in this house that night," he said. "Deliberately. Every last person who sat at that table. Because she intended to kill the one thing that mattered to me more than anything else in this world." His voice dropped, and the lower it went the further it seemed to reach into the room. "The very thing she had given me herself, that she meant to take back, to break me with the losing of it."

His eyes moved.

They left the crowd, traveled the length of the room, and came to rest on the two men sitting rigid in their chairs with sentinels standing at their backs.

"My sons."