Chapter 23

Garrett POV

The walk back from the council chamber felt about three miles longer than it actually was.

Ovid fell into step beside me near the courtyard, and I already knew from the way he wasn't talking that he had something to say and was working up to it.

"Rough session," he finally said.

"Don't."

"I'm just saying, Alpha Vane tore that whole thing apart in about two minutes."

"I heard him. I was in the room." My hands stayed fisted at my sides the rest of the walk, nails pressing crescents into my palms hard enough to sting.

"Corwin looked like he wanted to crawl under the table."

"Ovid."

"I'm just saying." He held both hands up, backing off,but the look on his face said he wasn't done thinking about it, even if he stopped saying it out loud.

Two of the younger warriors near the barracks went quiet the second I walked past, which told me plenty about how fast this had already spread. By the time I reached the training yard, one of the older wolves, a man who fought beside my father, gave me a look I recognized from childhood, the kind that used to come right before a lecture about thinking things through before acting on them.

I built a reputation over the years. A man who didn't jump at shadows or chase gossip. Watching that reputation take a visible hit in front of a room full of elders, over evidence that fell apart under two minutes of questioning, sat in my gut like something I swallowed too fast.

I found Calla near the eastern garden, sitting alone on a stone bench, apparently untouched by the chaos I just walked out of.

"We need to talk," I said, no preamble.

"Of course." She patted the space beside her, all soft concern. "You look upset."

"I am upset." I stayed standing. "That tin. The one from the records room. Where'd it actually come from?"

"I already told the council I don't know anything about it."

"I'm not the council." My voice came out lower than I meant it to, rougher around the edges. "I'm asking you directly. Where did it come from?"

She studied me for a moment, something calculating passing behind her eyes before she settled into an expression of gentle confusion. "Garrett, I really don't understand why you're asking me this."

"Because I need to know if I just humiliated myself in front of the entire council over evidence somebody handed me on purpose."

"You think I planted it?" Her voice climbed, wounded. "After everything I've been through with her, you think I'd do something like that?"

"I didn't say that. I asked where it came from."

She was quite a beat, fingers smoothing the fabric of her skirt in slow, even strokes.

"I actually think I remember it now that you mention it," she said finally, her tone shifting into something thoughtful, like the memory had just surfaced naturally. "Wren came by my room a few weeks ago. Brought some old things from prison, I think, trying to be sentimental about it. She must have dropped it then. I didn't think anything of it at the time."

It landed smoothly. Every word slotted into place like she rehearsed the shape of it beforehand, dressed up as a memory only just now returning to her.

"She's never once mentioned bringing anything sentimental to your room," I said. "In fact, from what I've seen, you two barely talk unless somebody else is watching."

"People behave differently when it's just the two of us."

"Is that so?"

"Garrett." She reached for my hand, and I let her take it, though something in me had already gone cold and careful, cataloguing instead of comforting. "I know this is hard for you. You've spent a long time believing certain things about her. It's not easy admitting you might have been wrong to trust the wrong narrative."

"I haven't admitted I was wrong about anything."

"Of course not." She smiled, understanding. "I'm just saying, it's natural to feel defensive."

I pulled my hand back and watched something flash across her expression before she smoothed it back into softness. Not hurt exactly. More like recalculation, the same look I imagined crossing a merchant's face when a deal started slipping sideways.

"I need to go," I said.

"Garrett…"

I walked off before she could finish, and I didn't look back to see the careful expression she settled into once I was out of earshot.

Her explanation replayed in my head the whole walk back to the barracks, and the longer I turned it over, the less it held together. A memory that conveniently surfaced only after I pressed her directly. A story that painted Wren as sentimental, a trait I hadn't once witnessed in her since she got back. An answer delivered without a single pause, a single stumble, the kind of hesitation you'd expect from someone genuinely searching their memory instead of reciting something already prepared.

I spent two years reading people for a living, watching for exactly this kind of thing on patrol, in negotiations, in every tense standoff where knowing who was lying meant the difference between walking away clean or walking away bleeding.

That answer didn't sound like a memory. It sounded like a script.

I sat down hard on the bench outside the barracks, elbows on my knees, staring at nothing in particular, running back over every conversation I had with Calla since Wren came home. All the soft, sympathetic phrasing. All the perfectly timed tears. All the small, generous gestures performed exactly when an audience happened to be watching.

I thought about the tin sitting in that records room, in a spot I nearly stepped on by accident, positioned close enough to the disturbed ledgers to be noticed by anyone walking through.

Too convenient. Too perfectly placed to be an accident, and now, apparently, too smoothly explained to be the truth either.

"Well,bloody hell," I muttered, dragging both hands down my face.

I didn't have proof of anything yet. Just a feeling settling in where my certainty used to sit. And since Wren walked back through that gate, I wasn't sure at all which sister I spent two years defending.