She Fell Asleep in an Abandoned Stable—Then the Alpha King’s Pregnant Wolf Curled Around Her, Choosing the Betrayed Woman as Her Future Queen

Chapter 6

Edmund was in a small room on the second floor.

It was not a cell. Sadie had braced herself for a cell; had built one in her imagination over the past days — gray and damp and terrible. What she found was close enough in its essentials to make the distinction feel dishonest. Small. A narrow bed. A table with a few books. A window high in the wall that admitted light without admitting the world.

He was sitting at the table when the door opened, and he looked up, and for a moment he simply looked at her with the expression of someone whose mind is working very fast to determine whether what they are seeing is real.

He had grown. Of course he had grown. Three years — boys grew. But she had been holding the eleven-year-old in her memory, and the boy who rose from the chair was nearly fourteen. Taller. His face longer, with the beginning of the angular quality their father’s face had carried.

He looked like their father. She had forgotten how much he looked like their father.

“Sadie.” His voice cracked on the second syllable.

She crossed the room and put her arms around him, and felt him grip her back with the force of someone who had been holding something for a very long time. She did not cry. She had decided she would not cry until this was finished.

“I’m here,” she said. “I have the documents. Everything is going to be corrected.”

He pulled back and looked at her face. His eyes — their father’s eyes, gray and steady — moved to the doorway, where Caius was standing. He assessed him with the same quick intelligence she remembered. The measuring look of a boy who had learned early that the room’s power structures mattered.

“Who is he?” Edmund asked quietly.

“Someone helping,” Sadie said.

“Your sister is more accurate than most people.” Caius’s voice came from the doorway. “That’s the complete answer.”

Edmund looked at him for another moment. Then, with the pragmatic acceptance of someone who had spent three years learning to evaluate situations on their current evidence rather than their past expectations, he nodded once.

“All right,” he said. “When do we leave?”

“Now,” Sadie said. “We leave now.”

Orvin did not argue.

Downstairs, in the ground-floor receiving room, Caius laid out the full weight of his authority with the calm efficiency of someone who had spent days preparing exactly this moment. His jurisdiction over the review. The legal records of Edmund’s false classification as an illegitimate ward — the word illegitimate made Sadie’s hands go cold, because Edmund was not illegitimate; he was his father’s son, born of a first marriage, with a documented claim to the Colwick name, and the letter had lied about that deliberately to make him something that could be moved and stored and forgotten.

The original inheritance papers bearing their father’s seal. All of it, set on Orvin’s desk.

Orvin signed what he was required to sign. He did not argue. Men like Orvin, Sadie was learning, did not argue once the power differential became sufficiently clear. They simply adjusted.

Edmund’s belongings fit into a small canvas bag. A coat too thin for the cold. The books. And a small wooden figure — a horse, carved with the particular care she remembered — that Sadie recognized with a tightening throat as something their father had made.

She said nothing. She put her hand on her brother’s shoulder, and they walked out into the cold courtyard, past the narrow windows, into the waiting carriage.

Behind them, the riders Caius had sent were already tying their horses to the rail — the freeze order had arrived in the night, and Orvin had been forced to hold when the transfer was already being prepared. Edmund had been hours from the road when the order struck.

Hours. Sadie thought about that in the carriage, in the silence, with her brother’s thin frame pressed against her side and his head heavy on her shoulder, asleep before the Hold was out of sight.

She did not cry. Not yet. There would be time for that later. First, there was the matter of making sure no one could ever take him again.

The weeks that followed were not quick. They were thorough.

Kais — Caius — brought the forged transfer documents, the original letters between Resna and the Ashevail Alpha, and the full record of Edmund’s illegal detention before the regional pack council. A formal proceeding, conducted in the great hall of the council seat at Drave, with witnesses, with the methodical procedural weight that made outcomes stick.

Sadie was present for all of it. She sat at the witness table and answered questions directly and produced documentation when asked, and she did not look away from Resna’s face across the room when the findings were read.

Resna’s expression throughout remained controlled — until the final finding. The full reversal of the property transfer. The restoration of the Colwick Holdings to Sadie’s sole ownership. The formal censure of the Ashevail Alpha. The dissolution of Fenwick’s marital claim.

At which point something in Resna’s face simply went still — in the particular way of someone who has exhausted their available responses.

Fenwick was not present. Fenwick had apparently left Veldmore Keep the week prior, on a journey to the Southern Territories, and had not returned. Whether this was coincidence or foresight, no one said aloud. It didn’t matter. He was absent from his own accounting, which was its own verdict.

The Ashevail Alpha lost two of his four territorial designations. His pack council was restructured under regional oversight. It was not destruction — Caius was not a man who destroyed when diminishment and correction would hold. But it was sufficient. It was, Sadie thought, exactly the weight of what had been taken, returned in the currency of consequence.

And then it was over. The papers were signed. The seals were set. The carriage turned south, home, toward Dravenmoor.