Evelyn POV
The castle gates opened before they even reached them.
Two guards stepped forward with their hands on their weapons, and Evelyn instinctively shrank back in the passenger seat. Three days ago, guards stepping toward her had meant something very different. But Matthias raised one hand from the steering wheel without slowing down, and the guards immediately dropped back and waved them through.
Just like that. No questions. No challenge.
That's what real authority looks like, she thought. Not the loud, threatening kind Draven performed at every opportunity. The quiet kind that didn't need an audience.
She faced forward as the vehicle moved through the gates.
And then she forgot to breathe.
She'd been bracing herself for something cold and militaristic, grey stone and hard edges, the kind of place that looked like the man who ran it. But Nordridge Castle in the early morning of Wintermoon Day looked like something from a story someone tells children at bedtime. Silver lights were strung from every roofline and archway. Great pine trees lined the entrance road, wrapped in white, glowing softly in the winter dawn. Wolves in warm clothes moved between the courtyards, laughing, carrying packages, holding steaming cups.
The whole place was alive in a way Shadowfen Castle had never been, not even during Draven's grand Wintermoon parties, which had always felt like performances. This felt real. Like people who were actually happy to be exactly where they were.
Evelyn stared at it through the window and felt something strange move through her chest.
Then the vehicle stopped, and Matthias was already out of the door.
She opened her own door before he could come around, because she'd been opening her own doors her entire life, and she wasn't about to become the kind of person who waited. She swung her legs out and stood too fast. The world tilted. She grabbed the door frame.
Matthias was there in two steps. Not grabbing her, not making a scene. Just standing close enough that if she went sideways, he'd catch it. She got her balance back and let go of the door, and he stepped back exactly the right amount.
"Thank you," she said.
He nodded and started walking.
She followed him toward the main entrance, doing her best to look like a woman who woke up in a border cabin after nearly drowning and then got brought to a royal castle every single day. Like this was perfectly ordinary. Like her legs weren't unsteady, and her heart wasn't hammering, and she wasn't acutely aware of every single wolf who turned to look at them as they passed.
They all looked. Every single one.
She kept her chin up and her eyes forward and stayed half a step behind Matthias, because his presence was a wall between her and all those stares, and she was not too proud to use it.
They made it through the main doors and exactly twelve steps into the entrance hall before the ambush happened.
"You have got to be joking."
The man came from the left, shorter than Matthias, broader, with a face built for honesty and currently deploying that face at full power. He planted himself directly in their path and looked at Evelyn like she was a grenade someone had handed him without the pin.
Then he looked at Matthias.
"Tell me that's not Draven's fiancée standing in our front hall."
"Owen." Matthias's voice was even. "My office. Now."
"My king, with the greatest possible respect," Owen was already following them, his voice low and urgent, "do you understand what Draven will do when he finds out? He'll go straight to the Council. He'll say we kidnapped her. He has allies in three kingdoms, and we just handed him the single best excuse he's ever had to"
"Owen."
"I'm just saying, the timing."
"Owen."
The Beta stopped talking.
Matthias looked at him calmly. "Get the council together. Thirty minutes."
Owen looked at Evelyn again. Then back at Matthias. Something passed between them, the shorthand of two people who had worked together long enough to have entire arguments in three seconds without making a sound.
Owen pressed his mouth into a flat line, turned on his heel, and walked away fast.
Matthias watched him go. "He's not wrong," he said quietly, almost to himself.
"I know," Evelyn said.
He glanced at her sideways. Then he kept walking, and she followed.
Thirty minutes later, Evelyn sat in a chair against the wall of the most intimidating room she'd ever been in.
The council chamber had a long table and eight chairs, and every single chair was filled with someone who looked extremely unhappy. Three of them had been openly staring at her since she walked in. One older woman with silver hair and sharp eyes was watching her the way hawks watched things from very high up, not threatening, just intensely evaluative.
Matthias stood at the head of the table. Owen sat to his right, arms crossed, still wearing the expression of a man mentally calculating disaster probabilities.
"She needs to go back," said a council member named Aldric Evelyn, who had caught his name when Owen introduced the room. He was heavy-set, red-faced, and spoke like every word was an important announcement. "Today. Before Draven even knows she's here. We send her back with an escort and a story about finding her wandering the border, and nobody has to know."
"She was thrown in the Frozen Crossing," Matthias said.
"By whom?" Aldric demanded.
"Her brother. Draven's second-in-command."
The table went quiet for exactly one second.
Then it exploded.
Everyone talking at once, voices climbing over each other. Marcus Carter? That's not possible. Are we sure? What was she doing at the border? Why would he? The silver-haired woman said nothing, just kept watching Evelyn with those hawk eyes.
Evelyn sat with her hands in her lap and her face neutral, and let the storm happen around her. She'd sat in rooms like this before, rooms where people talked about victims like they weren't present, where the actual human cost of a situation got buried under politics and procedure. She knew how to wait.
Matthias let it run for thirty seconds. Then he put the USB drive on the table.
The room didn't quiet down for that. He had to say "quiet" once, and something in his tone made it happen instantly.
He plugged the drive into the table's display screen. The images loaded.
And then the room went silent in a completely different way.
Not the silence of people choosing to stop talking. The silence of people who had just seen something that reached inside them and turned everything off at once. The kind of silence that has weight.
Evelyn had lived with this evidence for eight months. She'd built it piece by piece, and she knew every photograph, every document, every name on that list. She'd thought she was past the point where it could still physically hurt her to look at it.
She was wrong.
Seeing it on a large screen, in a lit room, with eight powerful people going completely still as they processed it, made it real in a new way. Not her private horror, carried alone in a locked bag. Something the world could finally see.
Her throat tightened. She looked at her hands.
Aldric, who thirty seconds ago had been loudly demanding she be returned immediately, said nothing. His face had gone from red to a grey-white color that made him look unwell.
Owen had uncrossed his arms.
The silver-haired woman, Evelyn, heard someone call her Maren leaned forward and studied the spreadsheet of names with an expression that had moved completely past politics into something much more human and much more angry.
"Two hundred and fourteen," Maren said quietly.
Nobody answered. Nobody needed to.
Matthias let the silence do its work. Then he said, "She spent eight months collecting this evidence from inside Shadowfen Castle. She got it out under Marcus Carter's nose. When he found out, he tried to bury her in the Frozen Crossing." He looked around the table. "This is what Draven has been running for five years while the Council of Alphas called him a model leader."
Aldric cleared his throat. "Even so," he said, but his voice had lost its certainty entirely, "harboring her puts us in direct conflict with."
"We're already in conflict," Matthias said simply. "We just didn't have proof until last night."
Another silence.
Maren sat back in her chair and looked at Evelyn directly, not around her, not about her. At her. "How certain are you of the authenticity of these records?" she asked.
"Completely," Evelyn said. "I photographed the originals myself. Payment records are cross-referenced with three separate accounts. The victim list was built from missing persons reports across four kingdoms over five years. It will hold up."
Maren studied her for another long moment. Then she looked at Matthias and gave one short nod.
Matthias looked at his council. "She stays. Protected witness, full security detail, under my authority." He held each gaze around the table for exactly a second. "Any objections go through me personally."
Nobody objected.
But Aldric, as they were filing out twenty minutes later, paused in the doorway and looked back at Matthias with something that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite warning; it was both at the same time.
"He'll retaliate," Aldric said quietly. "You know that. Draven won't absorb this quietly. Whatever he does next, it won't be small."
Matthias met his eyes.
"I know," he said.
Aldric left.
Evelyn stood in the emptying room and looked at Matthias across the long table, the USB drive still sitting between them on the screen, two hundred and fourteen names still glowing in the light.
"He's right," she said softly. "Draven is going to come for this."
Matthias picked up the drive. "Yes," he said. "He is."
He looked at her, and for just a moment, behind all that controlled stillness, she saw it again that flash of something deep and old and furious that had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with twenty-three wolves in the snow.
"Let him," he said quietly.
And somehow, terrifyingly, standing in an enemy kingdom with nothing but a borrowed blanket and a USB drive full of evidence that was the first thing in a very long time that made Evelyn feel like they might actually win.