FREYA

The guest room they put me in was clean and carefully arranged. I hated it.

Not the Luna’s quarters. Not anywhere near the Alpha’s wing. A guest room, with a guest room’s furniture, a narrow wardrobe and a writing desk and curtains that were expensive but not quite the same quality as the ones in the corridor I had walked through to get here. Someone had made a decision about what I was worth to this house and had expressed it in soft furnishings.

I stood at the window and looked out at the pack grounds below and thought about the fact that my name was no longer attached to Zoya’s death.

Corvin had stood up in that boardroom in front of the whole pack and taken the story apart piece by piece and had not, in any version of the telling, mentioned that I had been the one in that room with her when she died. He had kept that part. He had always kept that part. I did not know what that cost him or what it meant and I was not going to sit here at five in the morning and pretend I could do the same for him.

What I knew was that Zoya had held a pillow over Ryker’s face that night, her hands shaking with it, and when the moment came she could not press it down.

She stood there in the dark of her own son’s room holding a pillow over his sleeping face and her hands would not do the final thing.

I saw it. I watched the whole ugly trembling hesitation of it from the doorway and then I walked in and I made a decision.

I had never told Corvin that part. The part where she couldn’t. The part that would have made her human instead of monstrous. I had let him believe the worst version because it was simpler and because the truth was layered in ways neither of us were equipped to handle at the time. I was not going to tell him now. Some things stayed buried because the ground needed them there.

I also knew that Victor was alive, which was a problem.

I was standing in a guest room in Gravemoon pack while the man who had spent years making my life small was out there knowing I was breathing, and the only protection I had was an Alpha who had just legally mated someone else tonight and was currently in his room presumably making that arrangement more official.

That thought landed badly.

I had not anticipated Amaris.

I had known there was a mate by law. A Stormshadow female, chosen for the bloodline. Corvin had explained the arrangement when I was still in the cell, nothing to be concerned about, just the heir plan. He had made it sound like a transaction.

He had not mentioned that she was that young. Or that beautiful. Or that she had the kind of face that made it difficult to dismiss her even when you were actively trying to.

I was trying.

A soft knock came from the door and I smiled.

I knew Corvin couldn’t stay away tonight.

I crossed the room and opened it.

The woman standing in the hallway was not someone I expected. Blonde hair, polished, dressed too well for five in the morning.

I looked her over once. "Can I help you?"

She tilted her head. "Aren’t you going to let me in?"

"Why would I do that?" I leaned against the doorframe. "So you can set the house on fire again."

Her whole body went still. It was only a second.

She recovered fast. "I don’t know what you—"

"You do, actually." I looked at her calmly. "It wasn’t Victor. It was you. I was in that building, I know what I saw before I got out."

"Does Cole know?" She blinked. Just once.

"You know Cole is—" I interrupted her.

"Your brother. Yes." She smiled at me.

"Look at us. Having each other’s secrets." She retorted with a smug look.

She looked at me for a long moment with her chin level and her jaw working and then something in her face settled into an almost admiration, or at least the closest she probably got to it.

I stepped back and let her through.

She walked into the guest room and I closed the door and turned to look at her. She was taking in the room the way people took in rooms when they were assessing rather than admiring.

"It’s almost five," I said. "How can I help you?"

She smiled. "I wanted to see you in person. It’s resurrection season apparently."

I gave her a flat look. "Cut to it. You want to know if I’m going to tell Corvin you were the one who burned that building down."

She kept the smile but let it shift into something more honest. "Are you?"

"No." I looked at her directly. "My brother loves you. Whatever that says about his judgment, I’m not going to be the one who blows that up." I crossed my arms. "So no. Your secret is safe."

The smile widened, genuine this time in a way the first one hadn’t been. "I think you and I are going to get along very well."

"We probably will," I said. "Considering we both want Amaris gone."

She looked at me and the smile did not waver. "I love the way you think."

She turned toward the door and walked to it and stopped with her hand on the frame and looked back at me over one shoulder. She had the practiced ease of a woman who knew exactly how she looked from every angle.

"Victor says hi," she said. "He’ll see you soon."

She didn’t wait for an answer. The door clicked shut behind her.

I stood in the middle of the guest room.

Victor says hi.

My chest clenched like something had reached in and grabbed. I pressed one hand flat against the wall and made myself breathe through it slowly. Victor.

Who had survived on pure spite and the stubborn refusal to die when the world had given him every reason to. Who had people in this pack right now.

I started pacing. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Three steps to the window. Three back. My hands wouldn’t stay still. I pressed them together and pulled them apart and pressed them again. The room was too small and too quiet and I was not a person built for standing still while something circled closer.

I needed Corvin.

That was the honest thought and I let myself have it. I needed to be in the same room as Corvin and tell him that Victor had made contact and that I was not safe in this guest room and that whatever arrangement he had made tonight with whoever he had made it with, it did not change the fact that Victor Hale wanted me dead and was currently sending social messages through my brother’s girlfriend.

I knew Amaris would be there.

I was prepared for that.

He had told me himself that it was only the heir. That they were not connected. That she knew the arrangement. I was going to knock on his door and tell him I was scared and that was going to be fine.

I ran my hands over my hair and straightened my clothes and walked out of the guest room.

The corridor to the Alpha’s wing was dim and quiet, all the pack asleep at this hour or close to it. My footsteps were soft on the floor. I passed three doors, turned left, and stopped outside the one at the end.

I knocked.

It took longer than it should have.

Then the door flung open. Corvin stood in the frame without his shirt.

My eyes went past him immediately and found Amaris on the bed. The black lace was down around her waist. Her hair was loose across the pillow. Her chest was still rising and falling too fast and her face was flushed and her hands were loose in the sheets and she was looking at me with the wide-open expression of someone who had been caught at something and had not yet found her face again.

I brought my eyes back to Corvin.

Down to the front of his trousers.

Back up to his face.

He was hard.

They had been in the middle of it. Not finished. Not even close by the look of Amaris still catching her breath on that bed, her face open and flushed in a way it would not have been if she had known someone was about to see her.

I stood in the hallway in my plain clothes with Victor says hi sitting in my chest and my brother’s secret in my pocket and Corvin shirtless in front of me and I thought with a clarity that cut straight through every plan I had walked over here with:

What the actual fuck?