(Rhea POV)

They found the room on the second day of the investigation.

Vera's house sat at the western edge of the Silverpine compound — a stone building, older than the rest, built by Declan's grandfather. The basement had been listed in the original construction plans as a root cellar. No one had updated the plans since.

Kieran's team went in at nine in the morning. I received the photographs by noon. Torren brought them to me in the war room and stood in the corner while I looked at them, saying nothing, being present in the way that mattered.

The first photograph showed the door. Heavy oak, reinforced with iron bands, padlocked from the outside. A padlock on the outside of a basement door in a grandmother's house. I looked at it for a long time because it was the easiest thing to look at and everything after it would be worse.

The second photograph was the room itself. Twelve feet by ten. Walls lined with silver — not solid silver, but sheets of it, hammered flat and nailed to the stone. The metal had tarnished in patches, the color uneven, and there were marks on some of the sheets where something small had scratched at them. Fingernails. I could see the height of the scratches. Waist-level on an adult. Eye-level on a child.

The third photograph showed the floor. Two bolts drilled into the stone, eighteen inches apart, with chain loops attached. The chains were short — three feet, maybe four. Enough to sit. Not enough to stand. Not enough to reach the door.

The fourth photograph I held for thirty seconds and then put face-down on the table.

It was the collar. Hanging from a hook on the wall, the way you'd hang a leash in an entryway. Child-sized. Silver, tarnished, the interior surface darkened with something that had to be blood or fluid from burns that had wept and dried and wept again. It was small enough that I could have closed one hand around it. I couldn't stop seeing Lily's neck — the ring of raw skin, the layers of old scars and new damage.

Someone had hung it on a hook like a tool. Used it, put it back, used it again.

I turned the photograph over. Looked at it once more. Made myself see every detail — the circumference, the crude clasp, the stains. Filed it in the part of my memory where I kept the things that would sustain me through whatever came next, because rage is fuel if you know how to burn it slowly.

Torren hadn't moved from the corner. "There's more," he said. "Kieran's team confronted Vera."

"How did she take it?"

"She didn't break."

I wasn't surprised. Vera had been building this architecture for six years — the narrative, the justifications, the careful reframing of cruelty as care. People who build those structures don't abandon them when challenged. They defend them, because admitting the structure was wrong means admitting everything inside it was monstrous, and monsters don't think of themselves as monsters.

"What did she say?"

"She called it discipline. When they showed her the collar, she called it 'containment for unstable shifts.' When they told her it constituted abuse under Council law, she said the Council didn't understand what was necessary."

"Necessary."

"Her word."

The confrontation transcript arrived an hour later. I read it standing up, because sitting felt wrong.

Kieran had interviewed Vera in the main hall of the Silverpine packhouse. He'd brought photographs of the room, the medical report on Lily's injuries, Petra's testimony. He laid them out in front of her the way you'd lay out evidence in a trial — methodically, without emotion, letting each piece speak for itself.

Vera didn't flinch. Didn't cry. Didn't apologize. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and her spine straight and she looked at the Alpha King like he was an inconvenience.

"The child's wolf is unstable. It required management."