WREN POV
On the first day, Mira makes me talk to a wall.
Not literally. She stands against the far wall of her sitting room with her arms crossed and her expression completely neutral and tells me to make her feel safe enough to tell me something she does not want to tell me. No touching. No tricks. Just me and my voice and whatever it is I carry that I am still learning to understand.
I try for twenty minutes. I use warm words. I ask careful questions. I angle my body the way she showed me, open, non-threatening, the physical language of someone who means no harm. Mira watches me do all of it with the expression of a woman watching someone fumble with a lock they do not know how to open.
At the end of twenty minutes, she says, "You are performing safety. Stop performing it. Be it."
I stare at her. "What is the difference?"
"Performing it is something you do. Being it is something you are." She tilts her head. "You already know how to be it. You have been doing it without knowing it your whole life. Stop thinking about the technique and just be in the room with me."
I stop thinking about the technique.
I stop tracking my posture and my word choices, and the careful architecture of what I am trying to build. I just stand there. Present. And I let the thing that is always moving quietly underneath my surface do what it does naturally.
Mira's shoulders drop a quarter inch.
It is tiny. I would not have noticed it three days ago. I notice it now because I am watching for it and because I caused it, not with a trick but with something that is genuinely mine.
"There," she says. Quietly. Like I did something right.
That is day one.
Day two is harder. Mira teaches me how to answer a question with a question. How to give someone the feeling of information without the information itself. How to let silence do work because most people are uncomfortable with silence and will fill it themselves if you let them, and what they fill it with is usually more honest than anything they planned to say.
I am not naturally a silent person. I grew up in a pack that made me feel like I needed to justify my presence with words, with usefulness, with something to offer before someone decided I was worth the space I was taking up. Silence felt dangerous. Silence felt like the moment before someone remembered they did not really want me there.
Mira makes me sit in silence with her for fifteen minutes on day two.
It is one of the hardest things I have done since I arrived here. Harder than the first shift. Harder than reading my father's files. Just sitting there without filling the space and trusting that my presence is enough without words wrapped around it.
At the end of fifteen minutes, Mira says, "You just told me three things about yourself without speaking."
"What things?"
"That you are more comfortable than you look. That you are paying close attention. And that you trust me." She pauses. "That last one, I did not fully expect this quickly."
I look at her. "Is that a problem?"
"No," she says. "It means your instincts are good."
Day three is the real test.
Mira runs a simulation. She plays someone who has information and does not want to give it. She constructs a cover story, a reason she is in the Lycan Court, a version of events that is mostly true with one crucial lie buried in the middle. My job is to find the lie without her knowing I am looking for it.
I find it in eleven minutes.
Not by catching her in a contradiction. By noticing the half-second pause before one specific answer. By feeling the slight shift in the room when she said the lie, the way the air changed by some fraction that I cannot measure, but my gift registers anyway. Like a wrong note in a song. Brief. Real.
I circle back to the lie from a different angle. Ask a question that requires her to repeat the false information in a different form. She does. The pause is there again. Same pause. Same fraction of changed air.
I say, "You were not in the northern territory last winter."
Mira stops. Stares at me. Then she laughs, short and genuine. "How?"
"You pause before that sentence every time," I say. "Just slightly."
She shakes her head. "That is terrifying. I want you to know that. I mean it as a compliment."
I almost smile. Almost.
I am working through what the third day means practically. The meeting with the Accord is real. The person across the table from me will not be a friend running a safe simulation. They will be someone who does this for real, who has been doing it for years, who will be watching me just as carefully as I am watching them. I need to be better than good. I need to be seamless.
I am practicing a specific sequence, the opening exchange I have planned, working through it in my head when I feel something change in the room.
I look at the doorway.
Killian is standing there.
He did not announce himself. He is leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and his expression doing the contained, unreadable thing it does when he is observing something he has not decided what to think about yet. I do not know how long he has been there.
Mira looks at him. Then at me. She says nothing.
I raise an eyebrow at him.
He says, "Good."
One word. Then he pushes off the doorframe and walks away down the corridor.
I look at the space where he was standing.
Mira is watching me with an expression I do not fully want to examine. I say, "Do not."
She says, "I did not say anything."
"You were about to."
"I was about to say that a man who uses four words a day used one of them on you just now." She pauses. "Make of that what you will."
I make nothing of it. Out loud. I file it in the place where I am keeping other things I am not ready to examine, and I go back to running the sequence.
The Accord's response comes that evening.
Killian brings it to me himself. He holds it out, and I take it and read it standing in the corridor outside my rooms because I cannot wait to get inside.
Four days. A neutral location on the border of Lycan and Alpha territory. An old stone meeting hall, long unclaimed, known to both sides as neutral ground.
The representative they are sending is named.
I read the name.
I read it again.
The paper does not change.
Aldric Ashwood. My uncle.
The man who gave me a pill every morning for eighteen years. Who came to my birthday? Who asked about my friends and came to pack events and did all the visible things that looked like caring. Who was placed in my life deliberately by the people who wanted me small.
He is the one they are sending to turn me.
Because of course he is. Because they understand that a stranger cannot reach me the way someone who held my hand at twelve can. Because they know the shape of the wound, and they are sending the person who fits it.
I fold the letter.
My hands are completely steady.
I look at Killian. He is watching my face with the careful attention he gives hard moments. Waiting. Not filling the space.
"My uncle," I say.
"Yes."
I breathe in. Out.
"Good," I say.
He tilts his head slightly. A question without words.
"If they think sending him will break my focus," I say quietly, "then they still do not know who I am." I hand the letter back. "Let's use that."