He was right. I knew he was right the way I knew the evidence file was necessary and the patrols were necessary and every exhausting, strategic decision I'd made since Lily arrived was necessary. Being right didn't make it easier. Nothing about a stranger examining my daughter's burn scars was going to be easy, and pretending otherwise would be a lie I couldn't afford.

I looked at the photographs still spread on the desk between us. Lily's wrists. Lily's neck. Clinical images of a crime committed against a child who thought it was medicine.

"One visit," I said. "I am present the entire time. Lily decides how close you get and how long it lasts. If she shows any sign of distress, you leave immediately. And you do not touch her — not a handshake, not a pat on the head, nothing."

"Agreed."

"If you touch her, I'll remove your hand at the wrist." I held his gaze. "That's not a figure of speech."

He looked at me, and for half a second something passed through those grey eyes that wasn't political. Wasn't strategic. Something almost warm, except that wasn't the right word either.

"Understood," he said.

"Tomorrow morning. Lily does better in mornings — she's calmer, more verbal. By afternoon the burns ache and she gets tired." I was already thinking through the logistics. How to prepare Lily without scaring her. What to tell her about Kieran. How to explain that another powerful man was coming to look at her, but this time it meant something different. Whether I even believed that yet. "Ten o'clock. I'll come to your quarters and walk you over."

"I'll have my healer stand down. Your healer examines — I observe. Will that work?"

He'd brought his own healer. Of course he had. And he was offering to sideline them in favor of Isla, which meant he'd understood something I hadn't said: that Lily trusted Isla, and a stranger with medical instruments would undo three weeks of careful rebuilding.

"That works," I said.

Kieran nodded. He gathered the documents carefully — photographs first, then the bond testimony, then the timeline — and slid them back across the desk toward me. He handled them the way you handle something that matters. Not casually, not reverently. With precision.

"I'm going to be straightforward with you," he said. "I came here expecting to find a border-camp warlord holding a child as political leverage against a Council pack. What I found was a fortified territory with better infrastructure than half the packs in my jurisdiction, a two-inch evidence file, and an Alpha who threatened to cut off my hand if I scared her daughter."

"I didn't threaten you. I informed you."

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile — something closer to recognition. Like I'd confirmed a hypothesis he hadn't wanted to voice.

"I need to visit Silverpine after this," he said. "To see the room the child described. If it exists, Declan Ashford has a much larger problem than a custody dispute."

"It exists."

"Then so does his problem."

He stood. I stood. We were closer than I'd realized — the desk wasn't wide, and he'd been leaning forward during the documents, and I'd been leaning forward during the negotiation, and now we were both standing with maybe three feet between us.

His wolf moved. I felt it — the way you feel a weather change, pressure in the air. My wolf answered, a low involuntary pulse that I clamped down on immediately because this was not the time and not the person and not the situation for my wolf to have opinions.

Kieran's expression went blank for a fraction of a second — the blankness of someone slamming a lid shut. He felt it too. He buried it faster than I did, which meant he'd had practice, and the fact that the Alpha King had practice burying his wolf's reactions was a piece of information I noted and put aside for later.

"Tomorrow at ten," he said. He turned and walked to the door. His guards fell in behind him — a smooth, practiced formation, bodies angling to flank without being told. The door closed.

I stood in the war room, alone, with the evidence file on my desk and my wolf humming in my chest like a plucked string. I pressed my palms flat on the desk surface and breathed. Counted to ten. Did it again.

It wasn't Kieran. It wasn't the negotiation, or the guards, or the political calculation. It was the wolf thing. That pulse — involuntary, unbidden, my wolf reaching toward his like iron filings pulling toward a magnet. I hadn't asked for it. I didn't want it. I had exactly one priority, and it was sleeping in my quarters with bandaged wrists, and anything that divided my attention from that was a liability.

I locked it down. Filed it in the same place I kept the rage and the grief and every other feeling I couldn't afford: behind iron discipline, under heavy guard, for later. Always for later.

Later — much later, after the debrief with Torren — I'd hear what Kieran said to his aide while walking back to the guest quarters. My contact — one of the perimeter guards who'd been stationed close enough to hear — reported it verbatim.

"She's not what I expected," Kieran said.

"Dangerous?" his aide asked.

"Worse." A pause, long enough to be deliberate. "She's right."