I went up to the nursery at seven that evening because Lyric always fussed for me at seven. Some things a wolf does not have to be told.
The nursery Omega, Petra, curtsied and stepped back from the crib. She was a sweet girl, seventeen, one of the first I had ever trained. She smiled at me the way she always did — small, tired, glad to see me — and said the evening bottle was warmed and ready on the changing table.
I lifted Lyric out of the crib.
She was warm and heavy and smelled like sleep and skin and the powder I dusted into the folds of her neck every morning. I tucked her head under my chin and closed my eyes for one selfish second before I reached for the bottle.
My hand stopped an inch above it.
Something underneath the milk. Something acrid, so faint I would have missed it if I had not been standing there with my daughter's pulse against my throat and my wolf coiled tight under my sternum, watchful the way she had not been in years.
I picked up the bottle. I turned it in the lamplight. The plastic seal at the ring had been broken and pressed back down. Not badly. Just enough.
"Petra," I said. My voice did not change. "Who brought this up?"
"One of the new attendants, Luna. The taller one. She said Alpha wanted the schedule tightened."
"Thank you. I'll feed her tonight. You can rest."
Petra hesitated. Then she curtsied and went.
I wrapped the bottle in a clean burp cloth. I carried Lyric on my hip and the bottle in my other hand, and I walked, unhurried, down the back stairs and across the courtyard to the healer's ward.
Elara opened her door on the second knock. Her eyes went to the bottle before they went to my face.
I set it on her worktable. I did not say a word.
She understood. She always had.
"Sit," she said. "Give me an hour."
I sat in her armchair with Lyric asleep on my chest and watched Elara work. The little burner. The reagent drops. The tiny slip of paper that changed color slowly, then all at once.
Elara stared down at it for a long moment. Then she looked up at me, and her face was gray.
"Diluted," she said quietly. "But it's there. Wolfsbane."
My wolf did not roar. She went very still, the way a wolf goes still before she moves.
I nodded once. "Seal a sample. Label it. Keep one copy of your notes here. I'll take one."
Elara's hands trembled. Mine did not.
She drew off a small vial of the tainted milk, capped it, wrote the date and time in her narrow script. She slid the vial and a folded page of notes across the table to me. I tucked them inside the burp cloth beside the bottle.
"Luna," she whispered. "You cannot feed her from anything you didn't prepare yourself. Not one bottle. Not one spoon."
"I know."
I mixed formula in Elara's own kitchen with her own tin and her own water. I fed Lyric there, in the healer's armchair, humming the tune the old Omega Mira had taught me when I was a girl — a slow, lilting thing I had never heard anywhere else, that always seemed to settle in my chest like it had been waiting there. Lyric's small mouth worked. Her lashes lowered. Her fist curled around my thumb.
Upstairs in the writing desk, I opened the ledger and added a line.
*Saturday. 7:14 p.m. Evening bottle, nursery. Seal tampered. Tested by E. Healer. Positive: diluted wolfsbane. Sample sealed and retained. Delivered by A. Gomez's attendant per Petra.*
I capped the pen. My daughter breathed against my collarbone. My hand was steady.
This was the筹码. Every line. Every date. Someone had to remember.
---
I did not sleep that night. Or the next.
I sat in the nursery armchair with Lyric's crib pulled close and a lamp turned low and I watched the door. Elara sent Bree, a small quiet Omega girl with careful hands, to shadow the kitchens and the supply cart. Bree reported to me every morning at the servants' stair, three whispered sentences, then gone.
The system held.
But by the fourth morning my hands shook when I lifted the water pitcher, and my eyes had gone dark and hollow in the mirror, and I heard my own footsteps in the hall like someone else's.
At breakfast on the fifth day I passed the dining room doorway and heard her voice.
"—so worried about her, Julian. She barely sleeps. She hovers over that baby like — I don't want to say it — like she isn't well. The other wolves are starting to notice."
A pause.
"I only say it because I love Lyric too."
Julian did not answer. I heard the small clink of his cup against the saucer. That was worse than an answer.
That evening I climbed the stairs to the nursery with Lyric's clean blanket over my arm and put my hand on the door.
The knob did not turn.
I tried again. Slower. My palm had gone cold.
The lock had been changed.
I stood there a long moment with my forehead almost touching the wood. Inside, I heard a woman's voice I did not know murmuring to my daughter. My daughter, who did not cry, because she did not yet know she should.
My wolf pressed up under my throat, hot and shaking.
*Not yet,* I told her. *Not yet.*
I turned and walked back down the hall.
---
He summoned me to the study the next morning.
Julian did not stand when I came in. He did not look up from the papers on his desk. He spoke in the voice he used for correcting an Omega who had miscounted the linens.
"Analia's two attendants will oversee Lyric's care schedule from today. Feedings, baths, naps. They report to Analia. Analia reports to me."
The room tilted very slightly.
My wolf slammed against the inside of my ribs — a hot, furious shove that rocked me forward half a step. I felt my lips part. I felt something old and quiet in me finally, finally, want to say *no* in a voice that was mine.
I kept it small. I kept it precise.
"Julian." My voice did not shake. "I will not leave my daughter's care to wolves I do not know."
He looked up.
The Alpha aura came off him like heat off a furnace door thrown open. It hit my chest, my knees, the base of my spine. My legs folded and I caught myself on the edge of his desk with one hand, breath punched out of me.
His voice, when it came, was grinding stone.
"Defy me again, Luisa, and you will not see her at all."
I lowered my head. I heard my own breath rasp in and out. I did not answer, because there was no answer he would allow.
I left the study. I closed the door behind me with both hands so it would not slam.
That night, when the pack house had gone quiet, I knelt at the bottom of the wardrobe he had not opened in three years and lifted out the heavy winter cloak folded at the very back. I slit the lining along an old seam with a sewing needle. I slid a second copy of Elara's notes, folded small, into the wool. I stitched it closed by lamplight, my fingers steady, my jaw set.
Somewhere down the hall, behind a door I no longer had a key to, my daughter was sleeping under another woman's watch.
I put the cloak back. I turned out the lamp.
My wolf did not sleep either. She lay coiled and burning under my ribs, waiting for something I did not yet have a name for.
But I could feel, now, that she had one.