The wedding will take place tomorrow at sundown."
That was all, no softness. No acknowledgment of the body still cooling on the stone floor some feet away. No glance toward the girl standing beside him whose hand he was still holding and whose entire future he had just rearranged in a single sentence delivered with the same flat certainty he might use to announce a change in the weather.
Prince Varder released Ava's hand, turned from the arena, and walked back toward the royal table as though the matter were settled because as far as he was concerned it was.
The arena erupted.
Not the reverent roar that had greeted the princes' arrival. Something more complicated and less controlled than that. Voices layering over each other in the specific chaos of five hundred people processing something simultaneously and arriving at five hundred different conclusions. Pack leaders leaning together with urgent expressions. Elders rising from their seats. Servants frozen mid-task with pitchers in their hands.
Ava stood exactly where Varder had left her and did not move.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow she would be his wife.
Tomorrow the man with blood still drying on his hands would own her in every way pack law recognized and several ways it didn't bother to name.
She was still standing in the exact spot where he had pulled her to her feet. The stone beneath her was cold through the thin soles of her shoes. Somewhere behind her the remains of Alpha Cyrus lay where Varder had left them and she could feel the awareness of it at her back like a physical pressure, the specific horror of knowing what was there without being able to make herself turn and look at it.
She looked at the crowd instead.
She saw pity in some faces. Envy in others. finding Hazel near the far edge of the royal table, her hand still pressed flat against her sternum, her face carrying too many things at once for any of them to be fully legible. Their eyes met for half a second. Hazel looked away first and something in the way she did it — not dismissive, just unable — told Ava more about her sister's state than words would have.
her father was near the main entrance. Gamma Cole was walking towards her, looking at her with the expression of a man who has run every calculation and found that none of them change the answer. She was still standing in the middle of the arena and the crowd was still watching and she had spent three years learning how to survive being watched, she made herself look for her mother.
She found Rossana in the kitchen doorway. Her mother was already looking at her. Her face was very still and very white and her hands were clasped in front of her and she held Ava's gaze across the arena with an expression that said I see you and I am here and do not fall apart yet.
Ava held onto that look like a rope.
And then, because she was human and she was twenty years old and she had just watched a man die and been claimed and had her wedding announced over a dead body all within the space of an hour, she looked for Simon.
She found him without difficulty. She had always been able to find him in a crowd. Twelve years of knowing exactly where he was in any room had made it instinctive, involuntary, as natural as breathing.
He was standing near the eastern tier, slightly apart from the people around him, very still in the way he went still when he was controlling something he didn't want visible on his face. He was already looking at her. He had probably been looking at her for some time.
Simon's face and twelve years of shared history and the specific desperate hope of a person looking at the one thing they trust completely when everything else has become untrustworthy.
He held her gaze for one long terrible moment.
Then he turned and walked away and the crowd closed behind him and he was gone.
Ava stood very still.
The arena continued its noise around her. People continued their calculations. The body continued to lie on the floor behind her. Tomorrow continued to be tomorrow.
She made herself breathe. In. Out. In. Out. The trained, deliberate breathing of someone who has learned that the body will do what it needs to do if you just keep telling it to.
She picked up her tray from where it had fallen.
She walked back toward the kitchen.
She heard the whispers as she passed. She had always heard whispers. But these were different.
"The Cole girl. Did you see his face when he claimed her?"
"Wolfless though. What does he want with a wolfless—"
"After he killed Cyrus for her? Wolfless doesn't matter much when—"
"What do you think she did to make him—"
"Poor thing. Can you imagine? Married to him after—"
"Lucky is what she is. Disgraced family, can't shift, and she ends up with the prince? Some people fall upward no matter what they—"
Ava walked into the kitchen and set her tray on the nearest surface and stood very still for a moment with her back to the room and her hands flat on the table and she breathed and breathed and breathed until she was reasonably confident that she was not going to collapse.
Then she went to find her mother.
Rossana had moved from the kitchen doorway to the small store room off the main corridor, the one they used for overflow supplies, the one with the narrow window that let in just enough light to see by. She was standing in the middle of it doing nothing, which was how Ava knew she had been waiting.
Hazel was already there.
She was sitting on an upturned crate in the corner with her hands in her lap and her eyes red and when Ava pushed open the door and saw her sister's face something in Ava's chest that had been held very carefully in place for the last hour simply gave way.
she crossed the small room and Rossana's arms came around her and Hazel stood up from the crate and put her arms around both of them and the three of them stood in the narrow store room off the kitchen corridor while the palace continued its noise outside and Ava came apart as quietly as she had learned to do everything.
"I can't," she said finally, her voice breaking with the force of her sobs. "I can't do it. I can't marry him. You didn't— the way he— there was blood on his hands and he just— he looked at me like I was something he'd decided to keep and I can't—"
"I know," Rossana said. Her voice was steady and warm and certain. "I know, my love."
"Simon was there." The name came out smaller than everything else. Hazel's arms tightened. "He was standing near the eastern tier and I found him and I looked at him and he—" She stopped. "He walked away. He just turned around and walked away."
Hazel made a sound against her hair that wasn't quite a word.
"He was scared," Ava said, and she wasn't sure if she was defending him or condemning him or just trying to make it make sense. "Nobody wants Varder's— he was scared and I understand that I do understand that but he just—" She stopped again because the sentence didn't have an ending that made it hurt less.
"I know," Hazel said against her hair, and her voice was thick with it. "I know."
They stood like that for a while. The three of them. When Ava finally pulled back her mother cupped her face in both hands the way she had done since Ava was a child and looked at her.
"Listen to me," Rossana said quietly.
"I am going to get you out of this."
Ava stared at her convinced her mother was only trying to be caring. "But how" she managed to get out through her tears.
"The produce van comes Thursday evening. Every week without fail through the east service gate. The driver has made that delivery for years and the gate guards barely look at the cargo anymore." Rossana's voice was low and precise and utterly certain in the way that plans sound when they have been thought through carefully. "Tonight you will go to the storage room at the end of the east corridor. The large travelling bag — the dark canvas one with the brass clasps that we use for the winter linens — is already there. You will fold yourself inside it. You will wait. When the van comes I will make sure you are loaded with the produce and you will be through the gate before anyone knows you are gone, the van will stop at the market, go to your aunt Margret and stay with her for the meantime".
The store room was very quiet.
Rossana's thumbs moved gently across her daughter's cheeks, cleaning her tears with her hands. "You are my daughter. You did not ask for any of this. And I will not stand here and watch your life be handed to a man who claimed you over a dead body"
Hazel wiped her face with the back of her hand, her eyes were still wet.
"What about Father?" Ava asked.
Something moved briefly in Rossana's expression. "Your father cannot know. If he knows he will try to intervene through official channels and it will put him in danger and achieve nothing." Her voice was firm and loving in equal measure. "This stays between us. The three of us. Do you understand?"
Ava looked at her mother.
She looked at her sister.
Hazel nodded.
"Okay," she said quietly.
"Good." Rossana lowered her hands and straightened. "Go about the rest of the day as normal. Don't look afraid. Don't look relieved. Don't look like anything at all."
"I know," she said softly. "I've had practice."
She squeezed her mother's hand once. She looked at Hazel, who was still wiping her eyes and failing to look composed, and felt a rush of warmth for her.
The east corridor was empty when she reached it just before evening.
The storage room door was unlocked exactly as her mother had said. The large canvas travelling bag sat against the far wall between two shelves of winter supplies, dark and big enough for its purpose.
She just had to wait.