Chapter 22

Wren POV

They called it a formal council session, but it felt exactly like the tribunal two years ago, right down to the long table and the row of unfamiliar faces deciding what my life was worth.

I sat in the single chair set out in the middle of the room, hands resting flat on my knees, watching Elder Corwin adjust his reading glasses before he even looked at me.

"Wren Voss." He said my name like a formality he wasn't especially interested in. "You're aware of why you've been summoned."

"I've heard a version of it." I kept my voice even. "Something about a tin found in the records room."

"This tin." Corwin held it up, turning it so the lamplight caught the stamped mark on the bottom. "Recovered near the adoption ledgers, which had been disturbed. Do you recognize it?"

"It's mine. Or it was, back at Hallow Quarry." I didn't blink at it. "I don't know how it ended up in that room. I haven't set foot there since I got back."

"Convenient answer."

"It's the true one. I don't have another version to offer you."

A murmur passed through the row of elders, low and unreadable. Garrett stood off to the side near the door, eyes fixed somewhere near the floor instead of on me. I noticed that. He hadn't looked at me once since I walked in.

"You had a motive," one of the other elders said, an older woman I didn't recognize by name. "Questions have circulated about your origins in this family. Perhaps you went looking for answers of your own."

"If I wanted answers about my own adoption," I said, "I'd ask my mother. Not break into a locked room and leave evidence behind pointing straight at myself."

"Unless you were careless."

"I spent two years in a labor camp learning exactly how much carelessness costs," I said. "I don't make that mistake twice."

Corwin set the tin down, folding his hands on the table in front of him, unhurried. "The council isn't interested in speculation about your character right now. We're interested in facts. This item was found in a restricted area. You have no explanation for how it got there."

"I have plenty of explanations. None of them involve me."

"Such as?"

"Such as if someone else put it there," I said. "That tin's been sitting in a drawer in my room for weeks. Anyone with access to that room could have taken it."

"Who would have a reason to do that?" the older woman asked, skeptical.

I glanced toward Calla, seated near the back with Rosalind, her expression arranged into something sympathetic. Her fingers were laced together in her lap, thumbs pressed white against each other, the only part of her that wasn't performing composure.

"I couldn't say," I answered instead, because naming her outright with no proof would only make me look exactly as desperate as they already suspected me of being.

"Convenient, again, that you have no answer."

"I have an answer. I just don't have proof to hand you along with it. Those are different things."

Damian sat near the head of the table, jaw working slightly as he listened, hands gripping the edge of it hard enough that his knuckles had gone pale. He hadn't said a word since the session opened. I understood why. Speaking up for me here, in this room, in front of these particular elders, would cost him something political he clearly wasn't ready to spend yet.

"The evidence, taken together, is troubling," Corwin said, addressing the room now instead of me directly. "A prison relic in a restricted family archive. Disturbed adoption records. Given her history…"

"Given her history of what, exactly?"

The voice cut through the room clean, and every head turned toward the back where Emeric had risen from his seat, uninvited, his hands loose at his sides instead of clenched into anything dramatic. He didn't raise his voice.

"Alpha Vane," Corwin said, clearly caught off guard, "this is an internal pack matter.."

"I'm aware." Emeric walked forward a few steps, the same way he moved through everything since he arrived. "But I've been sitting here listening to a case built on a tin box and two ledgers pulled slightly out of place. That's it. That's the entire evidence."

"There's context to her history that.."

"There's a story about her history," Emeric said. "I've heard it a dozen times since I got here, and not once has anyone actually shown me proof of it. Just people repeating what they were told to believe."

The room had gone very quiet. Even Calla's expression had thinned into something less composed, her eyes flicking between Emeric and the council with the alertness of someone recalculating fast.

"With respect, Alpha Vane, you're a guest here," the older elder said. "This isn't your council to weigh in on."

"No. It's not." He didn't back down an inch. "But I've spent enough time in courts and councils to know when evidence actually holds up and when it's just weight added to a story people already wanted to believe. This doesn't add up. She had no reason to search those records. If she wanted answers about her own past, there are far easier ways to get them than breaking into a locked room and leaving a trail straight back to herself."

"Then who put it there?" Corwin challenged.

"I don't know." Emeric's eyes moved, briefly, toward Calla, before returning to the council. "But I'd start by asking who benefits from Wren looking guilty right now, instead of asking why a woman smart enough to survive two years in Hallow Quarry would be careless enough to leave incriminating evidence lying in plain sight."

Nobody answered that immediately. Garrett, still by the door, had finally lifted his eyes from the floor, watching Emeric with an expression I couldn't quite name. Not agreement, not disagreement. Something closer to a man recalculating everything he thought he already understood.

Corwin cleared his throat, glancing at the other elders, some silent negotiation passing between them.

"The council will take Alpha Vane's point under advisement," he said finally, stiff. "This session is adjourned pending further review."

Chairs scraped back. Voices rose into low, uncertain murmurs as the room began to empty. I stayed seated a moment longer, watching Emeric where he stood, still facing down elders twice his political weight without so much as raising his voice once.

Nobody had done that for me. Not once, not in this house, not in the two years before it.

He caught my eye across the room before Damian's voice pulled his attention elsewhere.

I sat there another second, turning that over, before I finally stood and let myself be led back out into the hall, the accusation unresolved but since walking into that room, not entirely mine to carry alone anymore.