Chapter 65

Abigail's POV

Olivia's face went pale.

But that was only for a moment. Very quickly her eyes reddened, tears welling up in a rush, as though some switch had been pulled.

"How can you say such a thing about me?" Her voice shook, thick with a wounded sob. "We are sisters, we grew up together from childhood — how could I do something so vicious to you? Abigail, you were frightened in that forest, and you were hurt, I can understand that, but you cannot, in a moment of confusion, pin such a crime on me!"

As she spoke, she looked around, as if silently pleading with the representatives for aid.

"If I truly wanted to harm her, why would I wait until today? We have lived in the same pack for seventeen years."

The words were spoken with genuine feeling.

Sisters, seventeen years, a frail girl weeping under humiliation and seemingly powerless to strike back — these things alone were enough to serve as the finest of protective charms.

The expressions of several council representatives did indeed soften somewhat. In that taut moment, out of the corner of my eye I caught the gaze of Alpha King resting upon me from his high seat, faint and hard to name, yet carrying a warmth I could not explain, and somehow it settled the unease coiling in my chest.

Nicholas waited until she had finished, then spoke plainly.

"First."

He held up the sealed oiled cloth.

"A sample was drawn from this team's water source and sealed personally by the participant Abigail Rodriguez. The pharmacist has verified it before all of you, confirming that the residue within is a synthetic marked-beast pheromone — a forbidden substance no honest hunter should ever carry."

Olivia broke in at once, tears still hanging on her face, her words quickened. "Who knows what was really inside it to begin with? The water source was contaminated — how does that necessarily have anything to do with me?"

Nicholas paid her no mind.

"Second."

He raised my sealed arm-guard again.

"The same compound's residue has soaked into the inner layer of her close-worn equipment. The traces run deep — by no means picked up by chance along the way, nor to a degree that ordinary washing could remove. Only by repeated dosing of the water source she drew from and touched again and again could such traces be left."

"Even if someone did poison the water, it isn't necessarily me!" Olivia's voice sharpened abruptly, then quickly pressed back down into trembling grievance. "There is more than one team that has drawn water nearby these past days. Alpha Nicholas, look closely — do not let the true culprit hide in the dark while I am wronged instead!"

She was still muddying the water. So long as the evidence could not point straight at her, she would never admit it.

Nicholas at last lifted his eyes, his gaze settling on her face.

"Third."

His voice was like a blade descending slowly.

"My lieutenant, at dawn, saw with his own eyes at the upper stream — that woman on your team called Megan, bent over the flow of water, pouring this liquid from her flask into the current bit by bit. The time, the place, every movement, all recorded clearly, matching exactly the moment the beasts turned mad."

Olivia's expression froze for an instant, and in that very instant a flicker of panic darted through the depths of her eyes. But quickly, as if she had seized her last remaining way out, she jerked her face up, her eyes reddened just right.

"Megan ... Megan is indeed one of my team, but what she did, I had no knowledge of!" Her voice was full of the shock and heartbreak of one betrayed by a subordinate. "How could I have imagined that someone at my own side would dare to do such a thing behind my back? If she truly did it, then it was her own doing."

She stopped a moment, then, as if choking back humiliation, added in a low voice:

"I too am one she kept in the dark."

That move was played beautifully.

Megan was thrust out without hesitation, made the sole culprit. And she herself retreated steadily back into the position of an innocent mistress deceived and betrayed by a subordinate.

Had the trial ended there, perhaps some would truly have believed her.

Nicholas fell silent for several seconds.

Then he drew a record from inside his coat.

"Megan has been questioned apart," he said, his voice without the slightest waver. "She has confessed to all of it."

Nicholas unfolded the confession and read it aloud, word for word, before all of them.

Megan said it was Olivia who commanded her to track this team's route of travel; it was Olivia who had her put that liquid into the water source; and it was Olivia who required her to clear the traces after the dosing. As for that flask of beast-luring mist-trace, it had been obtained by Olivia through the underground channels of the Thomas family.

Every line read aloud pressed down on Olivia like a stone laid upon her.

The pallor and the grievance on her face fell away swiftly, replaced by a scalding, blotchy red. Her lips were trembling, and her hands, hanging at her sides, had curled into two hard fists.

She did not cry. Those soft eyes, which had fooled so many people for so long, at last revealed the thing truly hidden beneath: fury, fear, and a bare, ugly hatred toward me.

That hatred was aimed straight at me.

This time, she performed nothing at all.

An older Alpha with grey threaded through his beard stepped forward. His voice was not loud, yet it carried the weight of an ancient law.

"By the iron rule of the hunt," he said, "one who deliberately uses a forbidden means to endanger the life of their own kind stands equal to a traitor to the pack, and is to be slain without mercy."

He paused, his gaze settling on Olivia.

"Olivia Rodriguez, condemned to death, to be carried out tomorrow."

Upon his high seat, Alpha King said nothing, only gave a slow, grave nod, and with that silent assent from the Alpha King, the sentence settled over the plaza with a weight no one could lift.

As these words fell, the whole circle went utterly still.

And it was in that dead silence that I heard Matthew move.

I turned my head to look at him. His lips parted slightly, and I could almost see that plea taking shape in his throat.

It was a father's instinct to place himself between his daughter and the sentence. For one suspended moment, I truly thought he would speak.

But the next instant, his gaze collided with Nicholas's immovable stare, then swept across the rows of representatives, across the evidence still laid out on the stone stand.

I saw that calculation pass across his face like a shadow. He knew that if he spoke now, he could not save her. It would only drag the whole of Crimson Fang Pack into the mud, ruin the pack's name before everyone in the council, and cost him everything he had built with his own hands.

So he closed his mouth.

He lowered his eyes, looked at the ground beneath his feet, and said nothing.

Across the circle, Olivia still stared fixedly at me. She was trembling all over, her fists clenched white, the hatred in her eyes burning like fire.

And I suddenly found that, in this very moment, I could already look back steadily, without the slightest fear.

On my face, there was not the faintest trace of wavering.