The dress still smelled like her when Caden Voss found me.
I was sitting on the narrow cot in the servants' quarters, my ruined hand pressed flat against my sternum, listening to the pack settle into its evening rhythms. Footsteps in the corridor above. A door closing somewhere. The distant clatter of the kitchen staff finishing the last of the banquet cleanup.
His footsteps stopped outside my door.
He didn't knock. He didn't enter. He just stood there in the corridor, and I knew it was him by the way he breathed—controlled, deliberate, the way a man breathes when he's decided to do something he can't take back.
"The healer's supply room," he said. His voice was low. Flat. Like he was reading from a report. "Northeast corner. There's a blind spot in the camera coverage. The wolfsbane that was used on you came from there."
I didn't move.
"I am not in a position to act on that information," he continued. "But I am telling you where it is."
Then his footsteps retreated down the corridor and were gone.
I sat there for a long time after that. The dress shifted against my skin when I finally exhaled, releasing another wave of Meadow's white-floral scent, and I thought about what he'd just handed me. Not a weapon. Not yet. A witness who wasn't ready to be a witness. A thread I couldn't pull on—not now, not without tearing everything before I had enough threads to matter.
But I had it. I filed it away in the same place I'd filed everything else.
I looked down at the blue silk pooled across my lap and understood something clearly: Meadow was patient, but she was not finished. Whatever she'd started with the wolfsbane, the dress, the managed humiliation in front of five Alpha delegations—that was preparation. She was building something. Removing me in pieces, the way you dismantle a structure you don't want anyone to notice you're taking apart.
I needed to still be standing when she made her next move.
I was wrong about the timeline. She didn't wait as long as I expected.
One week.
I learned later that she'd chosen the east wing corridor because she knew my schedule. The servants' route to the linen storage took me past it every evening around the same hour. She'd timed it. She'd prepared.
I was three corridors away when I heard the scream.
It was a good scream. High, broken, with just enough ragged edge to it to sound involuntary. The kind of sound that makes every wolf within range move toward it without thinking. I heard boots on stone—warriors, fast—and then voices, and then the specific quality of silence that falls when something has gone very wrong.
By the time the two warriors found me and brought me forward, the scene was already set.
Meadow was pressed against the wall of the east corridor with her back to the stone and her left forearm cradled against her chest. The cut was shallow—I could see that from ten feet away, my healer's eye measuring depth by the rate of bleed. Shallow and precise, angled to show dramatically against her pale skin. The silver blade lay on the floor beside her. Even from where I stood I could smell it.
My scent. On the handle. On the floor around it.
She was trembling. Her eyes were wet and enormous and she was looking at Edison, not at me. She didn't point. She didn't accuse. She just pressed her lips together and said, very softly, "I smelled her. She was right here."
Edison's face went black.
Caden stepped forward. "Alpha." His voice was careful. "The wound angle suggests—"
Edison turned his head and made a sound low in his throat. It wasn't a word. It didn't need to be. Every wolf in the corridor dropped their gaze to the floor. Caden's mouth closed.
Then Edison looked at me.
"You will go to the cells," he said. "Now. Move."
The Alpha tone hit like a wave breaking over my skull. I felt my legs take the first step before I'd decided to take it. My body answering a command my mind hadn't issued. That was the worst part—not the pain, not the humiliation. The fact that my own limbs betrayed me.
But I did not bow my head.
I walked down the corridor toward the stairwell. The warriors fell in behind me but I didn't let them take my arms. I kept my spine straight and my one good hand loose at my side and my ruined hand tucked against my chest where it always was now, where it lived, where I kept it safe from everything that wanted to destroy what remained of it.
As I passed Edison, I looked up.
I looked directly at his face for two full seconds. I counted.
He looked away first.
Deep in my chest, my wolf slammed against the walls of me so hard I nearly missed a step. Something cracked—not bone, not tissue. Something older. And for one fractured instant, a thread of silver-white light flickered through the marrow of my bones like a struck match.
Then it went dark.
But it had been there.
I kept walking.
