WREN POV
The cold is still in my chest when I ask him.
"Who sourced the suppressants?"
Killian does not look away. That is something I have learned about him in the short time I have known him. He does not look away from hard things. He faces them directly, the way you face something you have already decided you can survive.
"We traced the compound to an apothecary in the southern wolf territories," he says. "Closed for eleven years. But the purchase records were kept. Old habit of the owner."
"And?"
"The buyer used a false name." He pauses. "The signature on the delivery order did not match the name."
I wait.
"It matches the handwriting of someone inside this court."
The morning is quiet around us. Birds somewhere. Wind in the garden grass. Normal sounds happening in a world that just shifted under my feet again.
"Someone in your court," I say slowly. "Knew what I was."
"Before I did," Killian says. "Yes."
I let that land. Someone inside the Lycan Court looked at a six-year-old orphan girl with a rare bloodline and decided the safest version of her was a version that never became anything. They sourced the suppressants. They found my uncle. They placed the pills in my hands every morning for eighteen years through a chain of people I trusted because I was a child, and children trust the adults around them because what else are they supposed to do?
"Could it have been my uncle acting alone?" I ask. "Could he have found the compound himself and just forged a signature to cover it?"
Killian shakes his head once. "The compound requires court-level connections to obtain. It was restricted three centuries ago precisely because of its use in bloodline suppression. It cannot be sourced through normal channels. He holds my gaze. "Whoever obtained it had access and authority. Your uncle was the hand that gave it to you. He was not the one who put it in that hand."
Someone with power wanted me dormant.
Someone with power looked at what I was and decided I was too dangerous to exist in full.
I think about being twelve and walking into a kitchen and stopping a fight without trying. I think about being fifteen and calling a feral wolf back from the edge with just his name. I think about every time someone looked at me sideways and called it odd and moved away.
They were not moving away from something wrong.
They were moving away from something they could feel and could not explain. Something that should have been recognized and trained and understood from the beginning.
And someone made sure it never was.
"Did they know about the mate bond?" I ask.
The question comes out quieter than I intend it to. I am watching Killian's face when I ask it, and his face does not move, but something behind his eyes does. A small shift. The kind of shift that means the answer is yes and he is deciding how to say it.
He does not have to say it. I already know.
"They knew," I say.
"We believe so," he says carefully. "A True Omega and a Lycan King sharing a fated bond is not a small thing politically. If someone understood your bloodline and understood what it would mean when you came into contact with me, they had every reason to prevent it."
I stand up from the garden bench. I need to move. I walk three steps away and stop because there is nowhere to go that makes this smaller.
No mate bond means Killian eventually takes a political mate. A mate chosen by council. By the people around him, the people he trusted, the people who were already inside his court pulling threads he could not see. They would have chosen someone manageable. Someone they could work with or work around. And Killian would have ruled thinking he was building something real while the structure under it belonged to someone else.
And I would have stayed small my entire life and never understood why.
"How long?" I ask without turning around. "How long had this been planned?"
"We do not know the full timeline yet," Killian says behind me. "But the compound was delivered to your uncle beginning the month you turned one year old."
One year old.
Before I could walk. Before I could speak. Before I had a single memory of the world.
Someone decided my future before I was old enough to have one.
I turn around. Killian is watching me with those pale eyes and the expression he wears when he is waiting for me to land somewhere, not trying to direct where, just present for the landing. I appreciate that about him more than I know how to say.
"I want the name," I say. "The handwriting on that delivery order. I want to know whose hand signed away eighteen years of my life."
"We are working to confirm it," he says. "I did not want to give you a name until I was certain."
"How close are you to certain?"
"Close."
I nod. I breathe. I am doing the thing Mira showed me, putting the feeling in its place rather than letting it put me somewhere. The rage is real. It is enormous and clean and entirely justified, and it is going to be useful. Not right now. Right now there is too much I do not know yet.
"What happens to them?" I ask. "When you confirm it. What happens to the person who did this?"
"They will face Lycan court judgment," Killian says. "The full weight of it."
"I want to be in the room when that happens."
He does not hesitate. "You will be."
Something between us settles on that. Not comfort exactly. More like alignment. Two people facing the same direction.
I open my mouth to ask the next question, the one about my parents, the one that has been sitting at the back of my throat since yesterday, when I hear footsteps on the garden path. One of the court guards, moving quickly. He reaches Killian and holds out a sealed letter without a word.
The seal is black. I do not know what that means, but I know from the way the guard's posture changed when he arrived that it means something serious.
Killian breaks the seal and reads.
I watch his face.
He is good at stillness. Twelve years of ruling has made him very good at showing nothing when nothing is what the room requires. But I have been learning him. Small things. The way his jaw sets differently when something surprises him versus when something confirms what he feared. The way his hands hold paper when the words on it are neutral versus when they are not.
His hands are very still right now.
He reads it once. Then he reads it again. Then he folds it with precise, careful movements that are not casual at all.
He looks up at me.
"We need to go inside now," he says.
His voice is level. Completely level. The voice of a man who has decided something and is not going to let that something show until we are somewhere private.
I do not ask why.
I walk beside him toward the court doors, and my heart is beating fast and steady, and I am thinking one thing on a loop.
Whatever is in that letter is worse than what he has already told me.
And what he has already told me was bad enough to change my entire life.