~RYLAND’S POV~

I carried her up myself.

Cade offered. I didn’t answer him. I just lifted her out of the carriage and walked through the packhouse doors with her weight in my arms, and the staff who were still awake had the sense to get out of the way without being told.

I laid her down on her bed, pulled the blanket over her, and stood there for a moment looking at her face. Completely still. Completely spent. The blue tips of her hair dark against the pillow, something about them that still didn’t make full sense to me yet.

"Cade," I said, without turning around.

He was already in the doorway. "I’ve got her."

"Don’t leave this room," I said. "Not for anything. I don’t care what you hear, I don’t care who knocks. You stay here."

"Understood,"

I looked at Lyra one more moment. Then I went to call the emergency council meeting.

—

The council room at half past midnight looked exactly like what it was, a group of people pulled out of sleep or whatever they’d been doing, sitting in a room they didn’t want to be in, waiting to find out how bad the news actually was.

I didn’t sit down.

"What the hell is going on?" I said. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t need to. The controlled version of my anger had always landed harder than the loud one.

"I leave for one day. One day. And I come back to a dead body."

The room was completely silent.

I looked around at each of them, the careful faces, the averted eyes, the particular quality of silence that wasn’t just uncertainty. Some of them were afraid. Some were calculating. One or two were watching me with expressions I couldn’t fully read.

"Can someone explain what happened?" I said.

Nothing. The silence held.

Then the youngest member, a man barely past thirty who had been on the council for less than a year, spoke up in a voice that wasn’t entirely steady.

"We have no idea, Alpha Ryland, We genuinely don’t know how it happened."

"Oh, finally someone speaks," I said. Not unkindly, just with the particular dryness that came from standing in a room full of experienced people and watching the youngest one be the first to say anything.

"We found him exactly as Tyran described," another member said. "No signs of struggle. Nothing disturbed. It looked like he simply..."

"I’ve heard the description," I said. "I’m asking if anyone actually saw something. Heard something. Noticed anything unusual before it happened."

Silence again.

I pressed my palm flat on the table and looked down at it for a moment, because the alternative was saying something I’d regret. "Have you asked around? Guards, staff, trainees, anyone who was in or near that corridor?"

"I ordered that immediately," Tyran said, from his seat at the end of the table.

I looked at him. "And?"

"Nothing yet," he said. "But we’re still looking."

"We will find something," another member said. "We’re being thorough."

"Why go so far out of our way," Prentis said, "when we all know who the most obvious suspect is?"

The room went quiet in a different way.

"And who would that be?" Bren asked, his voice careful.

Prentis let the silence sit for a beat.

"Why don’t we ask our Luna."

Several people around the table visibly stiffened. One inhaled sharply. Mave looked at Prentis with the expression of someone watching a man step onto ice he hasn’t tested.

"What?" Prentis said, looking around the room. "You’re all thinking it and none of you will say it. Are you scared you might be next to drop dead for having an opinion?"

"Prentis." Mave said his name quietly, with warning in every syllable of it.

"It’s not difficult logic," Prentis continued. "Anyone who has stood against her position on this council has ended up in a bad situation. Harlan. Now Voss. The pattern..."

"That’s enough." I said it low. Quiet. The kind of quiet that made people stop moving. "Say one more word about Lyra in this room and see what happens."

I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t need to. Prentis went still, and I watched him understand.

Bren leaned forward before anyone else could fill the silence.

"If anyone had paid attention this evening, they’d know she was at the Harrow succession ball with Alpha Ryland all day. In a room full of witnesses."

"Meaning," another member said, "whoever we’re looking for is someone else entirely."

"Perhaps the alibi was the point," Prentis said, in a lower voice. Almost to himself.

Every head in the room turned toward him. He raised both hands slowly and sat back. "Just a thought."

Nobody responded to it. The room left it where he’d put it.

"I’ll take the lead on the investigation," Tyran said. "Continue what we’ve started, push harder on the questioning."

He looked at me across the table.

"You should get some rest. I’ll report anything significant as soon as I have it."

I nodded. Then I left.

—

Cade looked up when I came in. "She’s the same. Hasn’t stirred."

I looked at Lyra on the bed, same position, same stillness, the slow rise and fall of her breathing the only movement in the room. The sweat on her face hadn’t dried fully.

I sat down in the chair beside the bed. "She’s still sweating."

I reached over and brushed a strand of hair back from her face. Her skin was warm under my hand. Not fever-warm, something else, the particular heat of a body working through something at a deep level.

"Her body’s still adjusting," Cade said. "Processing everything from tonight. The full moon, the shift, the ball. That’s a lot for a system to work through in one night."

I kept my hand on her forehead for a moment. Then I sat back.

A knock at the door. Cade answered it, spoke quietly to whoever was there, took something, and closed it again.

"Report from the search," he said, coming back to his chair.

"Tell me."

"No eyewitness accounts. And according to the gate guards, no one entered or exited the packhouse grounds in the last hours before Voss was found."

I looked at him. "So the person is already inside."

"Or," Cade said carefully, "they came in earlier in the day, before anything happened. Before anyone would have been watching."

I thought about that. "Also possible."

"Then we pull the full day’s record," Cade said, already getting to his feet. "Everyone who came in and went out, from morning through to when Voss was found. We build the complete picture."

"Do it yourself," I said. "Don’t involve anyone else. We can’t trust the chain right now, someone in this building is working against us and we don’t know how far the reach goes."

Cade nodded. He was halfway to the door when I stopped him.

"Cade." He paused. "Also check who left after the incident. In the window between Voss being found and us arriving."

He was back in less time than I expected.

"That was fast," I said.

"The records were recent enough that it didn’t take long to cross."

He came back to the centre of the room and stopped. Something in his face was different, not alarm, but the particular stillness of a man who had found the piece and wasn’t sure yet what it meant.

"Several came in during the day, some left, a few stayed through the evening."

He paused.

"But only one left within the window, a few minutes before Elder Voss’s death was reported."

I looked at him.

He looked back.

"Lizabeth,"