Matthias POV
Her temperature was still dropping.
Matthias pressed the back of his hand to her forehead and felt the cold radiating off her skin like she was still in the river. He grabbed the second blanket from the shelf, layered it over the first, then crouched beside the fireplace and added two more logs. The flames jumped higher. Good.
He checked her pulse. Still weak. Still there.
He exhaled and sat back down in the chair beside her cot.
This was the part nobody talked about with hypothermia, the waiting. The part where you'd done everything right, where you'd pulled them out of the water and warmed the room and wrapped them up, and then all you could do was sit there and watch and hope that their body remembered how to fight for itself. Matthias had seen strong soldiers lose that fight. He'd held men's hands while their pulses faded out like a dying candle, even after everything had been done right.
He wasn't going to sit back and watch that happen to her.
So he didn't sleep. Not even close.
Every twenty minutes, he pressed two fingers to her neck and counted her heartbeat. Every hour, he checked her breathing. He moved her hands closer to the fire when her fingers went stiff. He added logs before the flames got low. He worked through the night the way he used to work rescue missions, methodical, focused, not letting his mind wander into "what if" territory because "what if" got people killed.
Around midnight, she stirred.
Just a small tension in her shoulders, a faint crease between her brows, like she was dreaming something hard. Matthias leaned forward in the chair, watching. Her lips moved without making a sound. Then she went still again, sinking back into that deep, exhausted sleep.
He let out a slow breath and leaned back.
That was actually good. Movement meant her brain was working. Her brain working meant her body temperature was climbing. She was fighting her way back from the edge on her own, slow and painful, but moving in the right direction.
He gave himself exactly three seconds to feel relieved.
Then he noticed the bag.
It had dried by the fire while he was focused on her vitals. The black waterproof casing had gone from soaking to barely damp, and in the firelight, it was more visible now, still strapped tight across her body, still double-buckled, the small lock on the zipper catching the light like it was daring him to try it.
He'd noticed it on the riverbank. He'd noticed it on the walk here. He'd decided to leave it alone because she was barely alive, and the bag didn't matter.
She was breathing steadily now. The bag still mattered.
Matthias reached over slowly and unclipped the first buckle. Then the second. The strap came loose easily. It was built to be removed fast if needed, which told him something. This wasn't a regular bag. Someone had thought carefully about how to carry it, how to secure it, how to keep it protected even in the worst conditions.
The lock on the zipper was a simple combination type. Matthias looked at it for a moment, then pressed both thumbs against the zipper pull and applied steady pressure. The lock held for about four seconds before the cheap plastic housing cracked and the zipper slid free.
Inside, everything was sealed in a waterproof pouch. Smart. Whoever packed this had expected to get wet.
He pulled the pouch open.
The first thing he found was a laminated ID card.
He held it up toward the firelight.
Evelyn Carter. Crisis Counselor. Shadowfen Kingdom Social Services.
He read the name once. Then again. Then one more time, very slowly, like maybe the letters would rearrange themselves into something less alarming if he gave them enough chances.
They didn't.
Carter.
The fire crackled. Somewhere outside, the storm gave one last groan and went quiet. The cabin felt very still suddenly.
Matthias set the ID card down on his knee and stared at the woman sleeping three feet away from him.
Marcus Carter was Draven's second-in-command. The man who had spent twelve years covering up Draven's crimes, carrying out his orders, and making inconvenient problems quietly disappear. The man who had stood on the other side of the river twelve years ago and helped Draven walk away from a military massacre without facing a single consequence. Marcus Carter was the reason twenty-three of Matthias's wolves had graves instead of lives.
And this woman shared his last name.
Matthias's jaw tightened.
Every trained instinct he had went cold and sharp at the same time. He'd pulled her from the water because a person drowning was a person drowning. He'd kept her alive through the night because he didn't let people die when he could stop it. But those were reflex decisions, gut decisions, and his gut hadn't known who she was when it made them.
His brain knew now.
He looked at her face in the firelight. She still had that worn-down exhaustion sitting in her features even in sleep. She still looked like someone who'd been running from something for a very long time. Her first words when she'd surfaced to consciousness had been please don't send me back to him not a threat, not a demand. A plea.
People on the wrong side of things didn't plead like that. They threatened. They bargained. They lied with confidence.
She'd sounded like someone terrified.
He looked back at the bag.
There was something else inside.
He reached in and found it small, black, and completely ordinary. A USB drive. He almost missed the tape on the back until the firelight caught it. He tilted it toward the flames and read the two words written in red ink.
Don't stop.
He turned it over in his fingers for a long moment.
Then he got up, went to the desk in the corner, and opened his laptop.
He told himself it was due diligence. He was the Alpha King. A woman connected to Draven's top man had appeared unconscious on his border with a locked bag and a sealed drive. Looking at it wasn't a violation; it was his responsibility.
He plugged it in.
One folder loaded. He clicked it open, and then he sat very still.
Photos filled the screen. Wolf after wolf, some young, some older, all of them with the same hollow look in their eyes. Numbers written on their arms in black marker. Chains. Small spaces. Cages built for animals, not people. His stomach turned hard and slow, like something inside him was physically rejecting what he was seeing.
He scrolled down.
Documents. Financial records with numbers that made his eyes stop moving for a second transfer in the hundreds of thousands, moving between accounts across four kingdoms, going back not months but years. Five years of consistent payments. Five years of careful, organized crime.
He opened a spreadsheet.
It was a list of names. Pack affiliations. Ages. Last known locations. He scrolled through it slowly, and it kept going ten names, twenty, fifty, a hundred. He kept scrolling.
Two hundred and fourteen names.
Two hundred and fourteen wolves who had disappeared and been tracked by someone who refused to let them be forgotten. Someone had connected every single dot. Had followed every trail. Had spent what must have been months building this file, piece by careful piece.
At the bottom of the folder, one final document. A single name at the top.
Draven.
Matthias's hands went still on the keyboard.
He read the document slowly, payment orders, transfer routes, safe houses used to move wolves across kingdom lines. Contact names. Dates. And instructions in cold, businesslike language about which wolves were priority targets and which could be disposed of if complications arose.
Disposed of.
He pushed back from the desk and stood up. He pressed both hands flat on the table and stared at the screen without seeing it, just breathing, because if he didn't breathe deliberately right now, he wasn't sure he would at all.
Draven had been trafficking wolves. Not recently. Not impulsively. For five years, with records and routes and staff and safe houses, a whole operation, running right through the legal system, right through the structures that were supposed to protect his people.
Two hundred and fourteen names.
Matthias turned around.
She was still asleep. The firelight moved softly and golden across her face. She looked peaceful now, the tension finally gone from her brow, her breathing slow and even, her hands open and relaxed against the blanket.
He walked back and stood over her. He looked at the ID card still lying where he'd set it.
Evelyn Carter. Crisis Counselor.
Not a soldier. Not a spy. A counselor, someone who sat with broken people and helped them survive what had been done to them. Someone who had apparently spent months sitting with Draven's victims while quietly, carefully, dangerously building the case to destroy him.
And Marcus Carter Draven's own right-hand man was her brother.
Who had thrown her in the river?
Matthias picked up the ID card. He looked at her face. He looked at the USB drive still sitting in the laptop, that folder of two hundred and fourteen names glowing on the screen behind him.
He crouched down until he was level with her sleeping face and studied it the way he used to study maps before a mission, looking for the truth underneath the surface.
He found it. She looked like someone who had been carrying an impossible weight for a very long time. Completely alone.
He stood up slowly and held the ID card tight in his fist.
One question had taken over his entire mind, quiet, focused, and more urgent than anything he'd felt in twelve years.
"Who are you, Evelyn Carter?"
She didn't answer.
But the USB drive behind him held two hundred and fourteen names that were counting on him to find out.