Evelyn POV
The name hit her like a bucket of ice water.
Matthias. Alpha King Matthias Nordridge.
She'd seen his face exactly once before in a grainy photograph tucked inside one of Draven's private files, the kind Draven kept locked away because the people in them were problems he hadn't solved yet. In that photo, Matthias had been in military uniform, standing at attention, looking straight at the camera like he was daring it to blink first.
He'd looked dangerous then.
In person, he was something else entirely.
"You're Alpha King Matthias," she said slowly, the words feeling strange in her mouth. "Draven's enemy."
Something flickered in those ice-blue eyes. No surprise. He'd been waiting for the recognition to land, watching her the way you watch a puzzle piece finally drop into place.
"Yes," he said.
One word. Flat and simple. And then his expression shifted barely, just a slight cooling around the eyes, a fraction more distance in his voice.
"And you're his fiancée."
He said it the same way someone might say, and there's the problem. Not cruel. Not accusing. Just a fact being placed on a table between them, heavy and impossible to ignore.
Evelyn's spine straightened on its own.
"I was never his fiancée," she said. "He made an announcement. In public. Without asking me." She held his gaze. "There's a difference between being someone's fiancée and being something they claimed in front of a crowd."
Matthias looked at her for a long moment. She'd learned to read silences the way other people read words, and he said: I'm deciding whether to believe you.
She didn't look away. She'd spent eight months being afraid in secret. She was done being small.
He moved first. He crossed to the desk in the corner, picked up her ID card, and held it up between them. "Crisis Counselor," he read. "You were inside Shadowfen Kingdom. You had access to his castle." He set the card down. "His staff evaluated you enough to give you that access. That's not something Draven does for people he doesn't trust."
"He trusted my brother," Evelyn said quietly. "Not me. I was a trophy. Something Marcus delivered that made Draven look respectable, a professional woman, educated, presentable. Draven doesn't trust anyone. He collects things. I was just his newest one."
The words tasted bitter. But they were true, and she'd made peace with the truth of them a long time ago.
Matthias set her ID card down slowly. He looked at the USB drive in his other hand. Then he looked at her, and this time the cooling in his eyes was gone, replaced by something that wasn't quite warm but was something adjacent to it. Recognition, maybe. The look of someone who had just quietly updated their conclusion.
"The documents don't lie," he said.
"No," Evelyn agreed. "They don't."
Another silence. Matthias walked back to the window. She watched him standing there, his back to her, and tried to figure out what was happening behind that controlled stillness. He was working through something. She could feel it.
He turned around.
"Here's the situation," he said. His voice had changed slightly, less personal now, more like a man delivering a military briefing. "If I keep you here, Draven will claim I kidnapped his fiancée. He has allies in three kingdoms. He'll go to the Council of Alphas, and I'll be isolated, maybe facing military action. My people will pay for that." He paused. "That's what keeping you costs."
Evelyn's chest tightened. She knew where this was going.
"And if you send me back," she said quietly, "he kills me and buries the evidence."
"Yes."
The single word sat between them like a stone dropped in still water.
She looked at the medical monitor still beeping beside her. She looked at the burned-down logs in the fireplace. She looked at the USB drive in his hand, two hundred and fourteen names, five years of crimes, eight months of her life.
She'd known this moment might come. She'd told herself she was ready for it. She'd built a plan in her head during all those months of secret work if the worst happened, if she got caught, if she had to run. She'd told herself she could face whatever came next.
But sitting here, in an enemy king's cabin, in a borrowed blanket, after her own brother had thrown her in a river, she felt the plan crumbling in ways she hadn't prepared for.
"I'll go," she said. Her voice was steady. She was proud of that. "I won't put your people at risk. Give me a head start, and I'll disappear somewhere far enough that Draven can't."
"No."
She blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"No," Matthias said it the same way he said everything, without raising his voice, without drama, like the decision had already been made and he was simply informing her of the outcome. He walked back from the window and sat down in the chair across from her, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.
"You're staying," he said. "Here. In Nordridge Kingdom, as a protected witness under my authority. You're going to work with my intelligence team to organize everything on that drive, and we're going to build a case strong enough to take to the Council of Alphas. A case they can't dismiss or bury."
Evelyn stared at him.
"You just told me keeping me here could mean war," she said.
"It could."
"And you're saying it anyway."
"Yes."
She shook her head slowly, something between disbelief and the fragile, terrifying beginning of hope moving through her chest. "Why? You don't know me. I walked into your territory unconscious. For all you knew, twenty minutes ago I could have been a spy." She met his eyes directly. "Why would you start a war for someone you don't even know?"
Matthias was quiet for a moment. Not the calculating quiet of someone choosing a lie. The heavier quiet of someone deciding how much truth to give.
Then he said, "Twelve years ago, on Wintermoon Eve, I was leading a military unit on a joint operation near the border. Twenty-three wolves. Good soldiers. People who trusted me to bring them home." His jaw tightened, just slightly. "Draven was commanding the allied unit. When things went wrong, and we needed his men to hold the line, he crossed the river and cut the rope bridge behind him. He left us there. Twenty-three wolves died in those mountains, frozen, hunted, bleeding out in the snow." His voice stayed level, but his eyes didn't. His eyes said everything the level voice was holding back. "I survived by crawling through three days of ice. When I finally made it out, Draven had already filed his report. Called it a strategic retreat. The Council believed him." The corner of his mouth pulled, just barely, into something that wasn't close to a smile. "I've spent twelve years knowing what he is and having nothing solid enough to prove it."
The fire crackled softly in the silence.
Matthias looked down at the USB drive one more time. Then he looked up at her, and for the first time since she'd woken up, his expression wasn't controlled or measured or carefully neutral.
It was raw. Just for a second. Just enough for her to see it.
"You spent eight months inside his kingdom, inside his castle, collecting evidence while wearing his ring on your finger and his name around your neck like a chain," he said quietly. "You built that file for wolves you'd never met, in a system that had already decided they didn't matter. You almost died getting it out." He leaned forward slightly. "You just handed me the proof I've been waiting twelve years for. The proof that could finally give twenty-three graves the justice they deserve."
He held her gaze.
"That makes you worth protecting, Evelyn Carter. Not because I know you." His voice dropped, low and certain. "Because I know exactly what it costs to do what you did. And people like that don't get thrown away."
The room was completely silent except for the quiet beep of the monitor.
Evelyn felt something crack open in her chest, not painfully, but the way ice cracks in early spring when the temperature finally shifts. She'd been holding herself together by sheer force of will for so long that she'd forgotten what it felt like when someone else said I've got you.
She swallowed hard. Nodded once.
"Okay," she whispered.
Matthias stood, tucking the USB drive into his pocket with the careful precision of someone securing something irreplaceable.
He moved toward the door and then paused, his hand on the frame, his back to her.
"Rest today," he said. "Tomorrow we start building the case."
He walked out.
Evelyn sat alone in the quiet room, the monitor beeping steadily beside her, twenty-three names she didn't know yet already beginning to feel like her responsibility.
And somewhere deep in the back of her mind, a thought she wasn't ready for yet started to form quietly and dangerously and was impossible to ignore.
Who is this man?