Marcus found me in the linen closet on Monday morning and would not look at me while he said it.
"Alpha wants the east hearths scrubbed before evening meal. Kitchen inventory needs redoing too. He says... he says it's more suited to your current duties."
Current duties. As if I had applied for a different job and been reassigned.
"Of course," I said, and watched his jaw tighten like a man biting down on something bitter. He didn't say sorry. Betas didn't apologize. But he closed the closet door softer than he needed to, and that was its own kind of confession.
I scrubbed hearths that had not seen my hands since I was newly mated, kneeling in soot while pack members passed the doorway and pretended not to see me, or saw me and flinched, or — worse — saw me and smiled the way Analia smiled, small and pleased. At the noon meal I watched her walk into the dining hall on Julian's arm, dressed for an alliance meeting with the Thornwood pack, seated in my chair like she'd been born into it.
In the corridor outside the kitchens, Soren caught my elbow. Quick, furtive. He pressed a folded cloth into my palm and kept walking without breaking stride, like we'd never touched at all.
I waited until I was alone in the pantry to open it. A heel of bread. A scrap of paper, unsigned, the handwriting careful and young.
*We haven't forgotten who you are.*
I read it once. My throat closed. Then I held the corner to the pantry candle and watched it curl black and fall to ash in the sink, because if it was found in my pocket, it would cost him more than a red face at a dinner table.
But I did not forget his name. I added it, that night, to the list growing in the false bottom of the ledger. *Soren. Loyal.*
---
The mentoring room had always been mine. Twelve Omegas and Deltas, cross-legged on cushions, learning to read a supply manifest, learning how to speak so an Alpha's temper didn't land on them. It was the one room in Ironcliff that still smelled like something I had built.
Analia walked into it Wednesday afternoon like she was walking into a house she already owned.
"Julian thought I should sit in," she said, settling beside him near the window, her voice pitched soft and bright at once. "I do so love working with the young ones."
I kept my spine straight. "We were reviewing feeding schedules for the nursery pups."
"Oh — but have you tried rotating on a shorter cycle?" She tilted her head at the room, drawing every eye. "It's gentler on their little stomachs. I did it for years with my own pack's pups."
It was wrong. Dangerously wrong, in fact, for pups still nursing. I opened my mouth to correct it.
"Fresh thinking," Julian said, before I could speak, and the room settled around his approval like water finding a lower shelf.
Petra's eyes came to me — small, searching, the way they always had. Waiting for my nod, the way I had taught her to wait. For half a second Analia's smile thinned to something with teeth in it. Then it was gone, soft again, sweet again.
After they left, Petra lingered by the door, pretending to fold cushions.
"Luna." Barely a whisper. "Two nights ago. I saw one of her attendants near the nursery supply room. After midnight. She didn't see me."
I wrote it down that same hour. Date. Time. Petra's name beside Soren's.
I told myself I was building a case.
I did not yet know I was building a coffin lid.
---
I heard it before I understood it — a sound with no shape, thin and wrong, cutting off instead of rising. Not Lyric's normal cry.
I was through the nursery door before my mind caught up with my legs.
She was rigid in the crib. Back arched, small fists curled tight, foam bubbling pale at the corner of her mouth, and her cries had gone silent, which was so much worse than crying.
I don't remember picking her up. I remember running, screaming Elara's name down a hallway that seemed to stretch and fold under my feet, the pack house erupting into noise and motion around me like water breaking against rock.
In Elara's quarters I stood at the edge of the table while she worked with hands that did not shake, though her face had gone the color of old paper. My wolf slammed and slammed against my ribs, a caged, useless fury with nowhere to go.
"She's stabilizing," Elara said finally, low. Then, lower still: "Wolfsbane. Again. Higher this time."
The door opened.
Analia stood in the frame, eyes red-rimmed, already trembling, already speaking — and Julian filled the space behind her, his face carved from something I no longer recognized as my mate's.