Eleanor left before the pack house stirred. I sat with her herb bundle in my lap and listened to the morning shift through the floorboards above me—footsteps, voices, the distant clatter of the kitchen. Normal sounds. The kind of sounds a pack makes when nothing has changed.
Except everything had.
I heard Romina's voice first. She had a particular pitch when she was giving orders—bright and sweet, like a bell with a crack in it. Through the ceiling I caught fragments. *Remove that. Throw those out. No, all of it.* A pause. Then something heavy dragged across the floor directly above my head. The Luna suite. My suite, twelve hours ago.
I pressed my fingers to the dead scar on my neck and breathed.
By midmorning, word had filtered down even to the Omega corridor. The omegas assigned to carry out her instructions moved past my door with their eyes averted and their jaws tight. One of them—a girl named Petra who used to help me press the herb cuttings every spring—stopped in the hallway just long enough to meet my eyes. She didn't say anything. She was holding a bundle of dried rosemary, the kind I'd been growing on the Luna suite windowsill for two years. It was going in the trash. I could see it in the way she held it, loose and apologetic.
I nodded at her. *It's all right.* It wasn't. But it wasn't her fault either.
From the yard, Barnaby's growl ran on and on like a low engine that couldn't find a gear to stop in. Nobody went near him.
---
She came in the early afternoon.
I heard the click of her heels on the corridor stone before the door opened—a deliberate sound, the kind you make when you want someone to know you're coming and to be afraid. The door swung in and Romina stood in the frame with a small, sorrowful expression arranged carefully on her face. She was holding a cloth-wrapped parcel. Food, probably. The performance required a prop.
"Jenna." Her voice was soft, full of practiced grief. "I wanted to check on you. This must be so hard."
I was sitting on the cot with my journal open. I did not stand up.
"Close the door," I said.
She did. And the moment the latch caught, the sorrow dropped off her face like a coat she'd been too warm in. What was underneath was not anger. It was something quieter and more comfortable than anger. Contempt.
"Little seat-warmer." She set the parcel down on the floor without looking at it. "I almost feel bad. Three years holding the chair warm. That's dedication."
I said nothing.
"No wolf." She tilted her head. "No real bond. Did you honestly think it was going to last? He marked you because the pack needed a Luna and I was—unavailable. That's all you ever were. A placeholder. His words, not mine." She smiled. "Well. Also his words."
I looked at her. I took my time with it. I let the silence sit.
Then I said, very calmly, "How long did the wolfsbane take to clear your system after you staged the river?"
The smile stopped.
Not faded. Stopped. Like a clock someone had reached out and grabbed by the hands.
For three full seconds she didn't move. Then her hand went to her collarbone—a fast, involuntary press of fingers, there and gone—and her eyes did something I hadn't seen them do before. They went flat. Not angry. Flat.
She picked up the parcel from the floor. She walked to the door. She opened it without turning around.
"Disappear quietly," she said. "Before things get worse."
She left.
I wrote in my journal: *Wolfsbane. Confirmed reaction. She knows I know.*
Then I underlined it.
---
I was almost asleep when she screamed.
It was a good scream. Loud and wet and ragged at the edges, the kind that pulls every instinct in a body toward it before the brain has a chance to ask questions. I was on my feet before I was fully awake, standing in my doorway, and the smell hit me at the same moment—silver, burning, the specific scorched-copper stench of a silver wound on wolf flesh.
Romina was in the corridor, twenty feet away, clutching her forearm to her chest. The sleeve of her white blouse was dark and wet. Her face was a ruin of tears.
"She attacked me—" Her voice broke on cue. "She had silver—she—"
Mateo came at a run from the direction of the stairs. He crossed the distance in seconds and caught her before she could fall, and she pressed her face into his chest and shook. He looked over her head at me.
I stood in my doorway. Both arms bare. Both hands empty.
"Mateo." My voice was steady. I don't know how. "Look at the angle of the wound. Look at which arm. She—"
"Enough." The Alpha tone hit me like a wall. My voice cut off. My throat locked.
He held Romina tighter. He did not look at her arm. He did not look at the corridor for a silver blade. He looked only at me, and his face was the face of a man who had already decided.
"You are banished from Shadowridge territory," he said. "Gone by dawn. If you are found on pack land after sunrise, you will be treated as a rogue trespasser."
Romina made a small, broken sound against his chest.
I could not speak. The tone held. So I just—looked at him. I looked at him until he was the one who turned away.
I went back inside. I sat down. I opened my journal to a fresh page.
I wrote: *By dawn, then.*
Below it, after a moment, I wrote: *Amanda.*
