~LYRA’S POV~

Lord Harlan’s body was discovered in his chambers the morning I was allowed to return to work.

It came to me secondhand, through a corridor, from someone who hadn’t been talking to me but was talking near me, which is how most things in a packhouse are heard.

The specific hush that swept through the building indicated that something serious had occurred and that people had not yet decided what to do with the information.

With a book in my hand, I waited for the next piece in the east corridor. They pointed to natural causes first. The healer’s initial assessment seemed to support the hypothesis that Lord Harlan’s heart had simply given out during the night because he was not a young man.

It was regrettable. Sad was it. It was typical of what took place.

The vial was then found by a servant while cleaning my room. Small. Glass. tucked away against the back wall where the table leg meets the floor, beneath my vanity table.

She brought it to Cade. Cade then brought it to the healer, who looked at it and said four words that reached me in the corridor outside the council room before anyone had officially told me anything.

"Fast-acting. Absolutely poisonous."

When I heard that, I was completely still and contemplated the course of events. This had taken some time from someone. The letters. The wolfsbane.

And now a vial, planted in my room, the morning after a council member who’d opposed me openly turned up dead.

This was not hurried. I was looking at the conclusion of a sequence that had been running since before I knew there was a sequence.

This was planned, and it had been planned for a long time.

The pack split along previously established lines. The people who had never placed their trust in me began to speak up about it.

I heard my name in rooms I passed, the particular drop in volume that indicated I was the subject, and the terms "framed" and "poisoner" being used by those who were giving me the benefit of the doubt.

I was not opposed by those who had stood by Ryland. However, their support changed from steady to cautious, which felt like a very long way from where it had been before.

That afternoon, Cade found me in the library. He looked at me with his usual directness as he stood in the doorway, which was becoming a regular occurrence in my life due to people appearing in doorways.

However, there were questions buried beneath the directness. They were visible to me. Because Cade was honest, trustworthy, and doing his job, he wasn’t going to assume anything, but he also wasn’t going to pretend that the questions weren’t there.

"I didn’t do it,"

"I know." A beat. "I believe." Which was sincere. I respected Cade sufficiently to appreciate his honesty.

By mid-afternoon, the council had gathered. I knew everything about how the proceedings had already been framed because I was not allowed inside.

With my back straight, my hands still, and my face doing what I had learned to do in Shadowfang, composed, unreadable, and giving no one anything to work with, I waited outside in the corridor.

I could hear voices inside. Not phrases. merely the tempo of the argument. The door then opened, and Ryland emerged. He gave me a brief glance before returning to the room and speaking to the council members who were still inside through the open door.

"Lyra didn’t do this." He said.

"That night, she was with me." I was inside when I heard the mumble. I waited until the door was shut before I grabbed his arm as Ryland fully stepped out and shut the door.

We stood in the corridor together.

"Ryland, Don’t lie for me. if they find out you lied to the council..."

"Then, before they do, we discover the truth."

He interrupted.

He turned to face me. His expression was controlled, but his eyes were doing something else, something more focused than either panic or rage.

"Do you believe in me?"

I said nothing. The straightforward response was difficult. I had learned over the course of eighteen years that losing trust led to harm, and that those who claimed to be on your side were the first to back off when the situation changed.

It was something my stepmother taught me. It was from Meredith’s packed auditorium of people who had silently watched my 18th birthday turn into an embarrassment.

I had learned it from Kael, who had turned me over to the woman who hated me without a second thought after looking at me and saying, "mate."

Trust was how you got hurt.

"Yes," I replied.

He gave a single nod, and his expression changed.

"Eren is already looking into it." "Kael is keeping track of supply records; he unfortunately knows poisons better than anyone else here. There is time. Not a lot, but sufficient."

"Is Kael assisting?"

"Kael heard you were poisoned and that you were framed for a crime the day you were cleared to leave your sickbed,"

"Lyra... He didn’t feel at ease about it."

I put that away and didn’t say anything...

I kept my composure throughout the remainder of the afternoon. I walked the halls with my head at eye level. In a steady voice that did not give away anything, I responded to the questions that were posed to me, where I was, when, and who could confirm it. I did not flinch, cry, or say the things I was actually thinking about, about what had been done and who had done it as I sat through informal questioning from two council members with my hands folded in my lap and my eyes fixed on whomever was speaking to me.

I remained composed throughout. I made it to the fourth hour before I needed three minutes.

I entered the small, dark storage room off the east corridor, which smelled like old wood and cleaning supplies, closed the door behind me, and gave myself exactly what I’d been holding back.

At first, it came out as a trembling breath. Next, another. The fear, the fury, the specific helpless rage of being set up this cleanly and efficiently by someone who knew exactly how much access they had to my life and had been planning how to use it for longer than I’d been watching, followed by something even harder, my hands pressing against the wall and my forehead dropping forward, everything I’d been carrying for the past six hours finding its way out at once.

Three seconds. I only gave it that. Then I stood up straight. I used the back of my hand to wipe my face. I took a breath until my hands stopped trembling. returned to the corridor after opening the door.

Nobody looked. Nobody was aware. And that was the only way it would continue to exist.

Eren found me in the library that evening. He did not make any announcements. He sat across from me, placed a small folded piece of paper between us on the table, and waited for me to open it. names on a list.

Contacts in the supply chain I couldn’t quite make out three notations in Eren’s slender handwriting that had a pattern-like shape or the beginning of one.

"The vial." He said. "The glass is particular. not stock in common. This is the kind of bottle that Shadowfang uses in the supply chain for his medicines.

He stopped.

"However, it was also used in a private purchase order from a Silverclaw estate account about 18 months ago." I perused the paper.

"Tyran?" I spoke softly.

"Not confirmed... however, the estate account is connected to a property Tyran manages."

The paper was tapped by him.

"From his end, Kael is following the supply records. By morning, he should have more."

I held the folded paper carefully.

"They planned this from the beginning." The letters were an examination. to see if I would hurry to Ryland. observing how I dealt with pressure. The wolfsbane made a point. And this... I came to a stop.

"This was always the move they were working toward,"

Eren looked across the table at me. "Yes," he simply answered.

It appeared as though he had arrived at the same conclusion three days earlier and had been waiting for me to get there.

"Then we need to move faster than they expect."

"Yes," he repeated. In the quiet library, we sat with the paper between us. Outside the room, the pack was still divided, the council was still uncertain, and someone was very sure they had won. They weren’t. No, not yet.

However, they were going to need us to prove it.