[Amber’s POV]
The next day they dress me in the clothes I arrived in. Not the silk—the bloodied traveling rags, the torn sleeve, the shoulder wound visible through fabric that has given up pretending it's intact.
The attendants handle me with the grim efficiency of stagehands preparing a prop, and the message is so loud it doesn't need words: I am not being presented to the Wolfblade court. I am being displayed.
The throne room swallows me whole the moment the doors open. Every seat filled, every balcony occupied, the full weight of the Wolfblade court assembled in dark finery and open hostility. Hundreds of hostile faces turning toward me with the synchronized precision of predators catching scent.
Arthur is stationed directly behind me—close enough that every breath he takes shifts the air against the back of my neck. I can feel the heat of his body through my ruined clothes like a hand hovering over a burn. Desmond's order: the bodyguard stays within arm's reach at all times.
The cruelty of that placement lodges in my chest painfully. Of course he would turn proximity into a weapon—station the one person the bond screams for close enough to taste and forbidden enough to destroy me.
"The accused will stand before the throne," a court official announces, and the title strips whatever was left of my name from the room.
I stand. My knees have opinions about this, but I overrule them the way I've overruled every part of my body that has tried to surrender since I got here. The walk to the dais is thirty feet of silence so dense I can hear my own bare feet on the stone.
Desmond watches from the Obsidian Throne with the patient focus of a man unwrapping something he intends to break slowly. He does not rise—the room is already arranged around him like a solar system that has accepted its center of gravity.
"This woman killed a member of the Wolfblade royal pack," he says, and his voice fills every corner without effort. "On Veyr territory, with a blade meant for cutting fruit. The wolf she destroyed was claimed by this crown."
A murmur moves through the court like wind through dry grass. I feel it on my skin—the collective recalculation of a room deciding how much contempt I deserve and how publicly to deliver it.
"The sentence is binding recompense under the old law." Desmond's gaze hasn't left my face. "Marriage to the crown. She will stand beside this throne as consort—a living record of her debt."
The silence lasts exactly long enough for someone to shatter it. "You would bind the Obsidian Throne to that?" A woman's voice from the second tier—aristocratic, dripping with the confidence of someone who has never once been interrupted.
"Unshifted trash," she continues, louder now, playing to the gallery, "with Veyr mud still on her feet?"
My spine locks. Behind me, Arthur's breathing doesn't change, but something in the quality of his stillness does—a tightening, like a bow being drawn.
"My lord." Another voice, male, louder, aimed at Desmond with the blunt entitlement of old blood. "With respect—why bind the throne to something that cannot even produce a wolf? She is half-human at best."
The word something sits on my skin like a brand. Behind me, Arthur shifts—tension coiling through his shoulders so hard I can feel the displacement of air against my back.
Every instinct I have says he is one breath away from stepping forward, and every instinct after that says the consequences would fall on me. I open my mouth before the rational part of my brain gets a vote.
"I killed a Wolfblade wolf," I say, and my voice carries further than I expect—clear, level, the particular calm of someone who has stopped being afraid because they've run out of room for it. "With a berry knife. No shifted form, no training, no advantage except proximity and poor judgment."
I turn my head just enough to catch the man who last spoke in my peripheral vision. "Which suggests that the wolf's royal bloodline was not quite the advantage you seem to think it is."
Silence. The kind that has a heartbeat—thick, stunned, the whole room holding its breath at once. The man's mouth opens, finds nothing useful, and closes again.
On the throne, Desmond's mouth shifts. Not a smile—something that lives in the same neighborhood but pays different rent. The expression of a man who has just watched his instrument perform beyond specifications.
Then Arthur's hand touches my lower back. Barely there—fingertips ghosting across fabric so lightly it could be imagination, could be nothing. Gone before I finish registering the contact.
But the heat floods through my chest like a door thrown open to sunlight, blooming outward through my ribs, and my breath catches once before I kill it. I do not look back. I do not know if it was intentional or involuntary, and I am not sure which answer would undo me faster.
A noblewoman in the third row leans toward her companion without bothering to lower her voice. "She won't survive the season. Unshifted consort is laughable—the court will eat her alive."
"The court," I say, turning my gaze on her with a steadiness I am manufacturing from pure spite, "is welcome to try. I've already outlasted one wolf today. My schedule is open."
Her mouth snaps shut. Beside her, an older lord coughs into his fist, and I cannot tell if it is disapproval or something he is trying very hard to disguise.
A noble in the front row rises—grey-haired, deliberate, the kind of man who times his questions the way a hunter times a shot. "Your Highness, the court requires clarity. When is the binding to take place?"
The room stills. Every gaze swings to Desmond, and I feel the shift like a change in atmospheric pressure—hundreds of bodies leaning forward by fractions of an inch.
Desmond does not answer him. He looks at me—directly, deliberately, with the unhurried precision of a man threading a needle through something that is still alive.
His silver eyes hold mine across thirty feet of hostile court, and his mouth curves into something that is not a smile but wears one's clothes.
"Three days," he says. Not to the man. Not to the court. To me—as though the rest of the room is furniture and I am the only thing in it worth addressing. "I see no reason to wait."
My fingers curl into my palms hard enough that the nails break skin, and the pain is the only thing keeping my knees from buckling.
Behind me, Arthur's breathing stops entirely for one beat—then resumes, slower, controlled, the breathing of a man who has just heard a door slam shut on something he cannot name.
Three days. Three days before I am officially in a cage, and Arthur is the one guarding it for the foreseeable future. Great.
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