Ava's hands were cold.
That was the first thing she noticed — the specific cold that started at the fingertips and moved inward, the kind her body produced when something had happened that her mind hadn't finished processing yet. She pressed them flat against the fabric of her dress and stood very still and watched.
Jason Vayne stood ten feet from the King with no weapon drawn and nothing in his hands and fifteen men positioned quietly around the hall's perimeter, and the room had the particular quality of a held breath — five hundred wolves who had come tonight for wine and ceremony and had received something else entirely.
"Proof," Denton said. "You walk into my hall and make a claim on a woman under pack law with nothing to show for it—"
