The captured assassin was dragged into the keep's lower chamber, chains clinking against the stone floor. Torches guttered against the damp walls, shadows stretching long. Orren stood with arms folded, his golden eyes burning through the gloom. Nevara lingered at his side, her expression unreadable, though the faint mist at her lips warned that her patience had thinned to frost.
The man tried bravado at first, sneering. "You think you can scare me?"
Nevara stepped forward, each click of her boots echoing. The temperature dropped with her approach, so sharply that his breath steamed white. Frost spidered over the shackles, biting his wrists until he hissed. Her voice was quiet, low and merciless. "I do not have to try."
He flinched as the stone under his chair crackled with ice. Orren leaned into the silence, his voice deep as thunder. "Tell us everything. Now."
The man's jaw worked, sweat beading on his brow despite the cold. Nevara's gaze didn't waver. "You dared to strike at children," she whispered.
"Imagine what I will do to the one who whispered in your ear." The frost crept higher, brushing his boots. He kicked uselessly, panic rising.
Orren watched her, felt the storm she carried, and marveled at how her words slid under the man's skin sharper than any blade. She wields fear like I wield steel, he thought. And she does it for them.
The assassin broke, shuddering. "Malrec… he wanted proof. Said she was dangerous. That the lord was blinded—"
Nevara's eyes narrowed further, frost forming lacework across the chair's legs. "Proof of what? Speak plainly."
"Th-that you're not to be trusted," the man stammered.
"He said if the court saw you lose control, he could turn the lords against you. That others outside the keep would join him. Allies… nobles with reason to fear beastfolk rising in power."
Orren's growl rumbled, deep and threatening. "Names. Give them."
The assassin's teeth chattered as the air turned bitter. "A few merchants, a lord in the east—he didn't tell me all. Just that more would come. That the children were a lever."
The temperature dropped again as Nevara moved closer, her shadow long and sharp against the wall. "You thought to use children as tools. You thought wrong."
Her words froze in the air, visible as crystals drifting toward his face. He broke fully then, sobbing out fragments—times, places, meetings whispered in cellars. He babbled about letters passed by night, a merchant's cellar near the east wall, and a gathering planned within the week. Each detail spilled as his body shook harder, his eyes fixed on Nevara as if she were death incarnate.
Nevara finally stepped back, frost retreating as she did. The man sagged in his chains, half-collapsed, eyes wide with terror and still gasping out stray names, begging her not to come closer again. Yet her gaze lingered, and he whimpered as though even her shadow might freeze him solid. Inside, Nevara steadied her breath, wrestling the chill back under control, but she did not let him see the tremor in her hands.
Orren placed a hand on the table beside him, golden gaze never leaving the prisoner. "You've signed your own fate. But you've given me enough to tear Malrec's web apart. And when I pull those threads, every ally you just named will follow." His voice carried the weight of a predator promising the end.
Side by side, Orren and Nevara turned. For a moment their gazes met, steady, unspoken. He had seen her sharpness, the way she cut to the truth. She felt the steadiness of his presence, the immovable wall at her side. Together, their silence was as dangerous as any sentence—ice and fang moving as one.
And in the frightened man's mind, one truth was carved clear: to harm the children was to invite ruin from both ice and fang, and there would be no mercy the next time.