Evelyn POV
She was drowning again.
The water was black and freezing, and it was pulling her down no matter how hard she kicked, no matter how loud she screamed inside her own head. The current had her legs. The cold had her lungs. And somewhere above the surface, getting farther away every second, was the faint orange glow of something warm.
Fight. Fight. Fight.
Evelyn's eyes snapped open.
She grabbed at the nearest thing, fabric, blanket, something solid, and sucked in a breath so sharp it hurt all the way down. Her heart was slamming. Her whole body had gone rigid, ready to run, ready to fight, ready to do something because every nerve she had was screaming that she was still in danger.
She wasn't in the river.
She was in a bed.
It took her three full seconds to understand that. A real bed, with real blankets, in a room that was genuinely warm, not the dangerous fake warmth she'd felt right before the river pulled her under. There was a small medical monitor beside her, the kind that read pulse and oxygen, and it was beeping in a calm, steady rhythm that matched the heartbeat she could feel pounding in her own ears.
She was alive.
She blinked at the ceiling. Okay. Okay. You're alive. That's something. Figure out the rest.
Her counselor brain kicked in before her panic could take over again, the same way it always did when things got bad. Name five things you can see. Go. Wooden ceiling. Medical monitor. A window with pale gray light coming through early morning, maybe. A fireplace with burned-down logs. And across the room, sitting in a chair with his elbows on his knees and his eyes already on her.
A man.
Evelyn's breath stopped.
He was big, the kind of big that took up space even when he was sitting still. Dark hair, a jaw like something carved from rock, and a scar that ran along the left side of his face from cheekbone to chin. He looked like someone who had been through things that would have destroyed most people and had simply kept going anyway.
But it was his eyes that made her freeze completely.
Ice blue. Pale and sharp and utterly focused and pointed directly at her with an expression she couldn't read. Not threatening exactly. Not warm either. Somewhere in between, like he was still deciding something important.
In his hand, held loosely between two fingers, was her USB drive.
Everything came back at once.
Marcus. The tunnel. The river. The cold. The terrible, crushing cold and the sound of her own heartbeat slowing down in her ears as the current took her under. And then hands. Someone's hands pulling her up, holding her, carrying her through the storm while she fought to say the only words that mattered.
Don't send me back to him.
This was the man who had pulled her from the water. This was the man whose shirt she had grabbed with frozen fingers and begged with what might have been her last breath. And he had gone through her bag. He had her USB drive. He had everything.
Evelyn sat up too fast and immediately regretted it. The room tilted. She pressed one hand to her forehead and gritted her teeth until the dizziness passed.
When she looked up again, the man hadn't moved. He was still watching her with those pale, unreadable eyes. Still holding the drive.
Evelyn's counselor instincts told her to stay calm. Her survival instincts told her to figure out exactly how much trouble she was in before she said a single word.
He spoke first.
"Your brother threw you in that river."
It wasn't a question. He said it the way you say something you've already worked out completely, where you're not looking for confirmation so much as watching to see if the person flinches.
Evelyn didn't flinch. She'd had a long time to prepare for what hearing those words out loud would feel like. She'd rehearsed it in her head during all those months of late nights and secret files and looking over her shoulder, someday someone will know, someday you'll have to say it out loud, and she'd thought she was ready.
She wasn't ready.
Her eyes filled with tears before she could stop them. She hated that. She pressed her lips together hard and stared at a fixed point on the blanket and breathed through her nose until the worst of it passed.
Then she looked up at him and nodded.
Something moved across his face. Fast, barely visible like a door opening and closing in the same second. He looked down at the USB drive in his hand, then back at her.
"The documents on this drive," he said. His voice was quiet. Controlled. But underneath it was something harder, something that had weight to it. "Are they real?"
Evelyn looked at the drive. Eight months of her life. Eight months of borrowed time, of fear so constant it had stopped feeling like fear and just started feeling like breathing. Eight months of victims whose names she'd memorized because she'd refused to let them just be numbers on a list.
"Every single one," she said.
Her voice came out steadier than she expected. Good.
She watched his expression carefully, the way she always watched people looking for the micro-expressions, the tells, the gap between what people said and what they actually meant. His jaw tightened slightly. His hand closed a little firmer around the drive. But his eyes stayed on hers, and they weren't disbelieving.
They were furious. Not at her. What was on the drive?
"Tell me how you got them," he said.
And so she did.
She told him about the first victim, a young omega girl named Sera who had come to Evelyn's counseling office six months ago, shaking so hard her teeth chattered, with a story about being evaluated by Draven's staff before suddenly being released without explanation. Evelyn had believed her immediately. She'd started asking questions.
She told him about the financial records she'd found when Draven's engagement announcement had given her access to parts of the castle she'd never been allowed in before. How she'd photographed documents late at night with her hands shaking so badly she'd had to take each shot three times. How she'd built the victim list name by name, connecting missing persons reports from four different kingdoms to a single operation.
She told him about the USB drive, how she'd assembled everything onto it over eight months, how she'd kept it in the waterproof bag because she always knew there was a chance she'd have to run fast and wet.
She didn't tell him about Marcus. Not the full version. Not yet. That part was still too raw and jagged to touch without bleeding.
He listened to all of it without interrupting once. She'd never had someone listen to her like that, completely still, completely present, not planning his next question while she was still answering the last one. Just listening. It was both reassuring and deeply unsettling, because people who listened that carefully were usually preparing to do something significant with what they heard.
When she finished, the room was quiet except for the steady beep of the monitor.
He looked at the drive one more time. Then he looked at her long and direct, with those ice-blue eyes that made her feel like he was reading something written on the inside of her chest.
"Two hundred and fourteen names," he said quietly.
"Yes."
"And Draven's records go back five years."
"At least five. There may be more before that. I only had access to what was in the castle."
He nodded slowly. Then he stood up, and even that was deliberate, no wasted movement, no fidgeting, just a man who knew exactly how much space he occupied and was comfortable with all of it. He walked to the window and looked out at whatever gray morning existed beyond the glass, his back to her, the USB drive still in his hand.
Evelyn watched him and tried to figure out what came next. She was in someone's cabin, in someone's medical bed, in a kingdom she'd crossed a border river to reach. She didn't know this man. She didn't know what he wanted. She didn't know if saving her life had been kindness or strategy or something else entirely.
What she knew was that he had her evidence. And right now, that made him the most important person in her world.
He turned back from the window.
And the way he looked at her when he asked his next question made the back of her neck prickle, not with fear exactly, but with the specific feeling of standing at the edge of something enormous, looking down.
"Do you know who I am?"
The fire crackled in the silence.
Evelyn looked at his face, the scar, the ice-blue eyes, the stillness that felt less like calm and more like controlled power. Something tugged at the back of her memory. Something she should know. Something important.
And then, slowly, it clicked.
Her breath caught.
She knew exactly who he was.