Agnes received the ssage at sundown. Folded once, no seal, tucked into the lining of a supply crate that arrived through the eastern gate.
She burned the note in the fireplace, watched the paper curl black, and went to bed beside Garrett as if nothing had changed.
She left before first light.
✦✦✦
The forest north of Darkhowler’s river bend was dense. But she moved quickly because she’d already mapped it two weeks ago.
He was waiting in the clearing with two guards flaking him at a distance. He looked thinner. Harder. Whatever had been stripped from him during exile had not taken the thing that made him dangerous. If anything, it had refined it.
"Father." She dipped her head. The deference was muscle mory. She had more versions of herself than most people had outfits, and she dressed for the occasion every single ti.
"You look well. He’s feeding you, at least."
"He thinks I’m his." Agnes pulled her cloak tighter. "The matebond helps. He can feel my emotions, so I make sure he feels the right ones."
Viremont’s mouth curved.
"And the confession?"
"Worked exactly as we discussed. Tears, remorse, the full performance. Garrett is earnest to a fault." She let her voice flatten into the register she used for things that didn’t matter. "Tiberon’s people stopped watching within a week. As far as Drakenfell is concerned, Agnes Viremont is a cautionary tale with a redemption arc."
She’d gone from most hated woman in Drakenfell to an inspirational story of growth in under three months. Branding was everything.
Viremont nodded slowly.
There it was. The look. The one she’d been chasing since she was old enough to understand that her father’s love had a price tag and she’d been paying installnts her whole life.
"And no one is looking at you?"
"No one is looking at ," she confird.
"Good." He paced. Slow, controlled, the walk of a man who had been displaced from his throne and had decided the displacent was temporary. "Things are moving."
"Rathmore is loyal to breathing." He stopped pacing. "n who take power they didn’t earn will trade it for survival when the man who built it cos to collect. That’s not politics, Agnes. That’s nature."
He turned to face her fully.
"I need to know where the Frostborne girl is."
Agnes t his eyes.
She spent twenty years learning how to read this man. Which silences ant approval. Which ones ant she should leave the room. His love had conditions. His anger didn’t. Every gift ca with a receipt and every kindness ca with an invoice.
The last two months had taught her sothing she didn’t have language for yet. That a man could hold her while she slept and not expect anything in return. That an apology could be real even when she didn’t believe it.
"I haven’t seen her."
He tilted his head with a curiosity that didn’t reach his eyes.
"You were in Shadowclaw recently. You ntioned that."
"I was. She wasn’t there while we visited." Agnes delivered it with the bored certainty of a woman reporting on soone she found uninteresting. "Garrett brought because he didn’t want alone here with your people still circling. The trip was brief."
"So you don’t know where she is."
"No."
He watched her for a long mont. The kind of long mont that had preceded punishnts when she was younger. A silence that tested whether the lie in your mouth matched the lie in your eyes.
Agnes held it. She’d been holding it her entire life. This was not new. This was the only thing her father had ever truly taught her.
How to lie to the most dangerous person in the room.
Viremont exhaled through his nose and turned away.
"Then she chose Drakenfell. The prince." He said it with the dismissive certainty of a man filling in blanks with assumptions that confird what he already believed. "Foolish girl. Sentint makes people predictable."
He resud pacing, hands clasped behind his back.
"It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need to be found to be useful. I have plans for Tiberon. For the prince." His voice dropped, the register he used when he was discussing people as inventory. "And for Shadowclaw."
Agnes kept her expression flat, but her pulse jumped.
"Are you going to kill Shadowclaw?"
Viremont shot her a look, amused.
"No interest in the other two?"
"Tiberon is boring. Dexmon is pretty but useless." She waved a hand. "Shadowclaw is the one with an army worth worrying about."
Viremont studied her for a mont, then laughed. Short, dry, the sound of a man who recognized his own pragmatism in his child and found it comforting.
"No," he said. "Killing Shadowclaw was never the plan. Dead n don’t sign treaties. Dead n don’t open borders. Dead n don’t hand over resources because the alternative is watching the person they love most suffer for their refusal."
He let that hang.
The architecture of his plan was visible in outline, even if the details were still hidden. Serena was leverage to control Fin. Predictable for her father.
"I’ll need you for sothing," Viremont said, shifting gears. Lighter now. "Soon. Not yet."
"What kind of sothing?"
"The kind that requires your position in Darkhowler to remain exactly what it is."
Translation: keep fucking Garrett and don’t get caught thinking for yourself.
"Are you keeping the heir happy?"
"Yes."
"Good girl. Don’t get too comfortable."
The words landed on her like a brand. She made a point not to react.
"I understand."
He kissed her forehead. The gesture was chanical. A stamp on a docunt.
"Go back before you’re missed."
✦✦✦
She replayed her performance on the way back. The vocal tremor was an eight. The "Dexmon is pretty but useless" line was true, and she nailed it. Nine out of ten for that one. Delivery was everything.
She entered through the eastern gate as the kitchen staff were beginning morning preparations. A cook noticed her and looked away. A guard nodded. Neither questioned why the Alpha’s mate was returning from outside the walls at this hour.
She climbed the stairs to their chambers, and pulled her cloak off.
Garrett was still asleep with one arm stretched across her side of the bed. He slept like a man who trusted the world not to take things from him while his eyes were closed. It was the most reckless thing about him.
She lay down beside him, fitting herself against his chest, pulling his arm around her.
He stirred. His arm tightened instinctively, drawing her closer.
"Hey." His voice was rough with sleep. "You okay?"
"My wolf needed fresh air."
Garrett pressed his lips to the top of her head. "You’re too cold."
"I’m fine."
He pulled the blanket over both of them, tucking it around her shoulders.
"Co back to bed."
Agnes closed her eyes.
She had lied to every person she had ever loved. She had poisoned a girl who had never hard her. She had drugged a man and destroyed his mind to keep a crown that was never hers. She had written letters to her father detailing plans that would have ended lives, and she had signed them Future Queen of Drakenfell because she had believed with the full conviction of a girl raised on ambition, that wanting sothing badly enough entitled her to it.
She did not believe that anymore.
The man standing in the woods outside these walls didn’t know the opposite.
And the girl whose location she had just protected, the girl she had called "my friend," the girl whose trust she had no right to and wanted anyway, would never know what had just happened in that clearing.
Convicted criminal. Compulsive liar. Professional manipulator.
And the only reason Serena Frostborne wasn’t currently a hostage.
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