The Advisor

His name was Corvin Hale, and he had the soft, unhurried manner of a man who had spent decades being underestimated on purpose.

Wren watched him from the gallery above the receiving hall, tucked behind a pillar where Kian had told her to stay out of sight, and felt something crawl up her spine the moment Corvin stepped through the doors beside Lord Marrow and Lady Selene. It wasn't recognition, exactly. It was older than that, a bone-deep unease that predated memory, the same way a burn scar aches before a storm rolls in.

"You feel it too," said a voice at her shoulder, and Wren nearly startled off the gallery rail before she recognized Emory, arms crossed, watching the hall below with the same wary focus she was.

"Feel what."

"Whatever's crawling under your skin right now. I can smell it on you from here." Emory's gaze didn't leave Corvin, who was bowing over Selene's introduction with the easy grace of a man who had done this a thousand times. "I felt it the second his carriage rolled up. Something about him sits wrong. I just can't place why yet."

"Who is he really?"

"Officially, he's a retired advisor, brought back out of respect for his history with the Marrow line." Emory's mouth twisted. "Unofficially, he was one of three wolves who sat on the war council the season Duskwood burned, back when I was too young to be in that room but old enough to remember the names. I hadn't thought about him in years. Didn't even know he was still alive."

Below them, Corvin straightened from his bow and turned, unhurried, scanning the hall the way a man might scan a room he already knew every corner of. His gaze drifted up toward the gallery, lingered a half second too long on the shadowed pillar Wren stood behind, and moved on.

Her heart didn't stop hammering for a full minute after.

"He saw something," she whispered.

"He didn't see you. You're too far back and the light's wrong." Emory's voice had gone tight all the same. "But he was looking for something. That wasn't idle curiosity."

Kian found them ten minutes later, having played host below long enough to satisfy politeness, and the look on his face when he climbed the gallery stairs told Wren everything she needed to know before he spoke a word.

"He asked after the healer's new apprentice," Kian said quietly. "Not by name. Just mentioned, in passing, that he'd heard the Ashbourne healer had taken on a girl from the coast recently, and wondered if he might meet her, since he takes an interest in herb lore from his travels."

Wren's blood ran cold. "How would he even know I existed?"

"That's exactly the question I don't have an answer to," Kian said grimly. "Nobody outside this house knows you're here. Emory's kept it that quiet. Which means either someone in my own household is talking out of turn, or Corvin Hale already knew to look for a Duskwood girl in this pack before he ever stepped out of his carriage."

"You think he's the one Emory saw that night."

"I think," Kian said, "that a man who spent fifteen years quietly retired suddenly reappears the same week a Duskwood survivor walks into my hall, and immediately starts asking after a girl he has no ordinary reason to know exists. I don't believe in that many coincidences."

Emory's jaw was tight enough to ache. "If it's him, we can't move carelessly. He's under Marrow's protection right now, a guest at this house during betrothal negotiations. If we accuse a retired advisor of orchestrating a massacre with no proof beyond an old burn pattern and a bad feeling, we don't just risk the alliance. We risk making ourselves look unstable in front of every lord watching how this pack handles pressure."

"Then we get proof," Wren said.

Both men turned to look at her.

"He wants to meet the healer's apprentice," she said, steadier than she felt. "So let him meet her. Let me stand in a room with him and see what he does when he actually looks at my face instead of a shadow behind a pillar."

"Absolutely not," Kian said immediately.

"You don't get to decide that for me."

"I get to decide what happens under my own roof, and I am not putting you in a room with a man who may have burned your entire family alive, on the strength of a hunch."

"It's not just a hunch anymore," Wren said. "It's the only thread we have, and it's about to walk back out that door in a matter of days once the betrothal terms are settled. If I don't do this now, we may never get another chance to find out the truth." Her voice cracked slightly, the first real crack she'd let either of them see. "I have spent fifteen years believing your father murdered my family. If there's a chance that's not entirely true, I need to know. I need it more than I need to be safe."

Kian stared at her for a long moment, something warring behind his eyes that looked, for once, less like an Alpha weighing strategy and more like a man terrified of losing something he'd only just found.

"If I let you do this," he said finally, "you do not go anywhere near him without me in the room. Not for a second."

"Fine."

"And the moment anything feels wrong, anything at all, you leave. No arguing, no finishing a thought, no gathering more proof. You leave."

"Fine."

Emory looked between them both, exhaling slowly. "For what it's worth, I think this is a terrible idea."

"Noted," Kian said, not looking away from Wren. "We're doing it anyway."

The meeting was arranged for the following afternoon, framed as nothing more than a healer's apprentice called in to discuss a rare herb blend Corvin claimed interest in, and Wren spent the whole of that night lying awake, staring at the ceiling, rehearsing a version of calm she wasn't sure she actually possessed.

She was still rehearsing it when a soft scratch came at her window an hour before dawn, too deliberate to be a branch, too careful to be the wind, and when she crossed the room and eased the shutter open, there was nothing outside but the dark garden below and a single fresh scorch mark burned into the wooden sill, exactly the width of a fingertip, still faintly smoking.

Someone had been standing right outside her window. And they wanted her to know it.