The note came on a Thursday, tucked into the gap under the crack in the silver wall during the four-minute window between guard shifts. I almost missed it. A scrap of paper, folded into a square smaller than my thumbnail, pushed through by fingers I never saw.
I unfolded it with shaking hands. Wolfsbane made everything shake now—my hands, my vision, the edges of my thoughts. But I could still read.
The symbols weren't letters. They were the code Pierce had taught me, dots and slashes standing in for sounds, meant to be traced rather than read outright. I mouthed them silently, translating as I went.
*Parker. Voss. Private talks. 'Managing your condition' before the Ceremony.*
Below that, in a different hand—smaller, more hurried, clearly added after the first message was already written: *Timeline moved.*
Two words. I read them four times before my stomach caught up to my brain.
I pressed my face to the crack. "Pierce."
Nothing. Wrong window. I'd have to wait for morning.
I didn't sleep that night. I lay on the cot with the shackles biting into my wrists and ran the pack house floor plan through my head like a woman counting rosary beads. The morgue tunnel. Eastern wall, beneath the healer's wing, built decades ago for the rare wolf who died in captivity and needed to leave without the rest of the pack asking questions. I'd walked it once, years ago, when Parker still let me shadow him through pack business. Service door. No camera—Shadowthorn didn't spend money on cameras for a tunnel meant for corpses. Exit lets out near the old grain silo, half a mile from the tree line.
By the time the corridor above went quiet again, I had every foot of it memorized.
"Eastern wall," I whispered through the crack. "Morgue tunnel. Service door, no camera. Comes out by the grain silo." I gave him the rest—distances, blind spots, the guard who always smoked a cigarette by that door on his break and would look the other way for the right price. "If someone needs me out of here without walking out the front, that's how."
Pierce's silence had a texture to it now. I could read urgency in the length of his pauses.
"Understood," he said finally. "Rest if you can."
I didn't get the chance.
Parker came that afternoon. I smelled him before the door opened—cedar and bergamot, a scent I used to breathe in on purpose, back when it meant something. Now it just meant *danger*.
He dismissed the guards with a flick of his hand. "Give us the room."
They went. The door shut. He stood on the other side of the bars with his hands in his pockets, and I recognized the expression instantly, because I'd seen it a hundred times across six years of marriage—the face of a man who'd already made his decision and was only now getting around to performing the regret.
"You look terrible," he said.
I said nothing. My silence used to unnerve him back when I was his Luna. It still did.
"The pack's moved on, Harlow." He said it gently, like he was breaking news I hadn't already lived through. "Valentina's good with them. Better than I expected, honestly. She listens. People like that."
Still nothing.
"Your family's territory," he went on, "it's Shadowthorn's now. Permanently. By right of alliance." A pause, like he expected me to argue the legal technicality. I didn't. I already knew the answer to every objection I could raise. He'd spent years making sure of it. "This isn't what I wanted," he said. "But you left me no choice."
I'd heard that sentence before. He'd used it on a Beta he demoted for asking too many questions. On a healer he replaced for disagreeing with a diagnosis. It was never true then either.
He shifted his weight, and something flickered across his face—the first crack in the performance. "Dara's going to adjust your dosage," he said, almost as an afterthought, like it was a courtesy. "For your comfort."
My silence held. I watched him instead of speaking, the way I used to watch a wolf lying about a border dispute, waiting for the tell.
He found none of the reaction he'd come for. His jaw tightened. He left without saying anything else, and I heard his footsteps take the stairs two at a time, faster than a man walks when he's satisfied.
The second the door upstairs banged shut, I pressed my face to the crack.
"He's going to kill me," I whispered. "Soon."
The answer came without hesitation, low and absolutely certain.
"No," Pierce said. "He isn't."
