She looked down at her hands. They were shaking. She hadn't noticed until now. She pressed them flat against her thighs and breathed and told herself what she always told herself.
"It's going to be okay", except now she knew nothing was going to be okay.
But Simon's face when the guard reached him kept replaying. That one look he had thrown her before they took him away.
She stood up from her bed.
She didn't think about it. Thinking about it would have produced reasons not to do it and she was done producing reasons not to do things. She had spent three years producing reasons not to do things and all it had gotten her was a canvas bag and a handprint on her face and a husband who had walked into her garden and taken the only person she had left.
She swiftly jumped out of her window, she had been sneaking out of it since she could remember.
She didn't know exactly where the dungeon was.
She had a general sense. Down. East wing. The part of the palace that nobody talked about specifically because the things that happened there were understood without being discussed.
She had been in this palace three years and she had never had reason to go there and now she had every reason and she walked with the specific focused direction of someone who had decided something and was executing the decision before the part of her brain that was good at talking her out of things caught up.
The east corridor. Then down.
She found the stairs leading to them.
She was halfway down them when the voice came from behind her.
"I wouldn't."
She missed a step and nearly fell, if it wasn't for Ryder's steady grip on her back.
He immediately released her and leaned against the corridor wall at the top of the stairs with his arms crossed and his sharp calculating eyes on her face.
She looked at him, her eyes wild with shock.
"The guards down there answer to Varder directly," he said. His voice was conversational. Unbothered. Like he was discussing the weather rather than the fact that she was two flights of stairs away from her husband's dungeon. "You'll get halfway through the door before they stop you and then he'll know you tried and it'll be worse for the boy."
Ava said nothing.
"I'm not telling you what to do," Ryder said. "I'm telling you what happens. There's a difference."
She studied his face. The sharp eyes. The careful neutrality of a man who watched everything and revealed nothing and had chosen — for reasons she couldn't map yet — to be standing in this corridor right now saying what he was saying.
"Why are you telling me this," she said.
He was quiet for a moment.
"Because you're smarter than walking into a dungeon with no plan," he said. "And it would be a waste."
She looked at Ryder, she had to trust him if she wanted to get Simon out of there.
"what do I do," she said.
It wasn't quite a question. He seemed to understand that.
He pushed off the wall and looked at her with those sharp eyes and something moved in them that she couldn't place.
"You get dressed," he said. "You go to the gala this evening. You stand next to my brother in front of every pack leader in the territory and you look like exactly what pack law says you are." A pause. "And you let me handle the boy."
Ava stared at him.
"Why would you do that," she said.
Ryder looked at her for a moment. Then he looked away down the corridor with the expression of a man deciding how much of something to say.
"Because my brother is making decisions with the wrong part of himself," he said simply. "And someone has to think clearly."
He turned and walked back down the corridor.
He didn't look back.
Ava stood at the top of the dungeon stairs in her too-large plain clothes with her hands steady now, she looked at the space where Ryder had been and she thought about what he had said and what he hadn't said and what the difference between those two things meant.
She didn't trust him.
She didn't trust anyone in this palace. That was a lesson the twenty four hours had taught her with considerable thoroughness.
But he was right about one thing.
Walking into that dungeon with no plan was exactly what Varder expected her to do.
She turned around and ran back to her room before her guard noticed that she had sneaked out through the window.
She had to think of a plan, she couldn't get caught this time around.