WREN POV
Mira finds me in the corridor before I have decided where to go.
That is the thing about standing in the hallway of a ransacked room with a warning note still burning in your memory. Your feet stop working. You stand there, and your brain keeps cycling through the same four words, and you forget that you are supposed to be moving somewhere.
She is not safe here.
Mira appears at the end of the corridor like she was sent, which she probably was. She takes one look at my face and does not ask a single question. She simply takes my arm and steers me away from the council wing and through two doors and into her own rooms before I have fully registered that I am walking.
She sits me down. She pours something warm and puts it in my hands. Then she pulls a chair across from me and sits and looks at me directly the way she always does, no softening, no performance of comfort.
"Tell me what you know," she says.
So I do.
She listens to all of it. Harken. The Grey Accord. The empty rooms. The note. Her expression moves through things quickly, surprise for about one second, then something harder and more focused. When I finish, she is quiet for a moment.
Then she starts talking.
She tells me about the Grey Accord the way someone talks about a thing they have known existed for a long time and watched from a careful distance. They are not new. They have been operating in the edges of the wolf world for decades, collecting members in positions of influence, moving slowly because slow is invisible and invisible is safe. They do not want power for themselves exactly. They want a different structure of power. One where no single king can make a decision that changes everything. One where control is spread across a council of Alphas.
The idea sounds reasonable on the surface, she tells me. That is the point.
"But what they actually want," Mira says, "is chaos managed by the people who are already managing it. And those people do not want a peacekeeper anywhere near the structure."
I hold the warm cup in both hands. "Because a True Omega can calm things down."
"Because a True Omega can walk into a room where six Alpha leaders are about to declare war on each other and stop it before it starts," Mira says. "Chaos is currency for people like the Accord. You are the opposite of everything they need to exist."
I sit with that.
I have spent my whole life being told I was not enough. Not shifted enough. Not powerful enough. Not useful enough. And the actual truth is that I was always too much for the specific people who needed me small.
"Should I leave?" I ask. The words come out before I have fully decided to say them. "Go somewhere outside the court. Somewhere, the Accord cannot reach easily. Somewhere safe."
Mira looks at me.
The look she gives me is not unkind. But it is the specific look of someone who has just heard a sentence that does not make logical sense and is being patient about it.
"You are the safest weapon in this court," she says. "Running would just mean you are an unprotected weapon."
I open my mouth.
"Think about it," she says before I can respond. "Alone, you are an eighteen-year-old girl with a new wolf and no court standing. Here, beside Killian, you are the Lycan King's fated mate with a True Omega bloodline and an entire security apparatus around you. Where exactly is the safer option?"
I close my mouth.
She is right. Completely and frustratingly right. Running would feel like control. It would be the opposite of control. It would be handing the Accord exactly what they arranged for eighteen years. Wren Ashwood, alone and small and away from the one place where her power actually means something.
I will not give them that. Not after everything it cost to get here.
"Okay," I say. "Then what do I do?"
Mira's expression shifts into something that looks almost like satisfaction. Like I just answered a question correctly.
"You learn," she says. She stands up and moves to the large cabinet against the wall. She opens it and pulls out a stack of documents thick enough to make my arms dip when she drops them into my lap. "Start here."
I look at the stack. "What is all of this?"
"Court records. Histories. Every major ruling Killian has made in twelve years and the political context behind each one. Council meeting notes. Pack alliance agreements. The structure of how this court actually operates." She sits back down. "Not the ceremonial version they would have shown you eventually. The real one."
"Why does this matter right now?"
"Because the Accord's power comes from knowing more than you do," she says simply. "Every advantage they have had over this court is an information advantage. Harken fed them what they needed and kept Killian working with incomplete pictures." She meets my eyes. "You want to help? Stop being someone who can be surprised by what this court contains."
I look at the documents in my lap.
Then I start reading.
Mira works at her own desk. The room is quiet except for the sound of pages turning. I read faster than most people expect. It was the one thing I was always good at, the quiet skill of a girl with too much time alone and not enough people who wanted to include her. I read the council histories and the alliance records and the legal rulings, and I start building a picture of the court that is more complicated and more real than anything I understood before today.
Killian's twelve years read like someone building a wall one stone at a time in the middle of a storm. Every decision is made carefully. Every alliance earned. Every enemy was managed with the exact amount of force required and no more. He is a precise ruler. Not a cold one. Precise. There is a difference.
I am halfway through the fourth document when I find it.
It is tucked between a land dispute ruling and a pack census record. A sealed inquiry, the seal partially broken as if someone opened it and put it back. Eleven years old. The date puts it one year after the destruction of the Ashwood rebel pack.
The name on the filing is Killian Voss.
I read the heading.
Internal Inquiry: Origins and Verification of Intelligence Report 7-Ashwood. Filed by: The Lycan King. Status: Pending Review.
I turn the page.
Killian filed an inquiry into his own order. One year after it happened. He questioned it. He wrote clearly that certain elements of the intelligence report felt inconsistent on reflection. The timing of the threat notification had been unusually convenient. He wanted the original source verified by an independent party.
I keep reading.
The inquiry has a second document attached. A response from the council records office, dated three weeks after the filing.
Inquiry 7-Ashwood has been reviewed. No further action recommended. File closed.
Three lines. No explanation. No independent verification. No named reviewer. Just three lines and a closed stamp.
Someone buried it.
Killian asked the right question one year later. He felt something was wrong. He tried to find it. And someone inside the council made sure he never did.
I look up from the document. Mira is watching me from her desk. She can tell from my face that I found something.
"He already knew," I say. My voice sounds strange to my own ears. "He already felt it was wrong. He tried to investigate, and someone stopped him."
Mira is quiet for a moment. Then she says, "He has never stopped wondering."
I look back down at the paper in my hands.
Eleven years ago, Killian tried to find the truth about what he did to my family.
Someone made sure he could not.
And now I am sitting in his court holding the proof of that buried question, and I do not know what to do with the feeling it has put in my chest, which is large and complicated and not at all what I expected to feel today.