The ward had settled into the kind of quiet I thought I needed. Grandpa Memphis was sleeping again. Clara had dimmed the lights and gone to refill my IV bag down the hall. Julian's chair by the door was empty—he had left an hour ago, or maybe two. Time wasn't moving the way it usually did.
I was staring at the ceiling, counting the soft seams in the tile, when the mind-link opened inside my head.
It didn't knock. It didn't ask. It just opened, the way a door opens when someone kicks it.
*Hello, sweetheart.*
Estelle's voice, low and amused, threaded directly into my consciousness. I flinched so hard the IV line tugged at my wrist. I tried to slam the link shut—every wolf knew how, you pushed back, you closed the channel—but she had wedged something into the connection. A recording. Pre-packaged. Already playing before I could find the edges of it.
And then it wasn't her voice anymore.
It was Julian's.
Low and rough, the way I had only ever heard it in the dark of our own bedroom. *Say it again.* A laugh, breathless, hers. The unmistakable sound of a headboard against a wall I had painted myself. *Tell me whose Luna you are.*
*Yours. Only yours, Julian—*
The pack house. I knew the acoustics. I knew the room. I knew the exact creak of the floorboard near the window because I had asked Julian to fix it three times and he had said he would get to it.
I lay there in the white bed with the white gauze on my arm and I listened to the whole thing.
I did not close my eyes. I did not turn my head. I let the recording play through my skull the way Estelle had clearly intended it to play—every sound, every breath, every promise made in a room I used to sleep in. The mind-link rendered it in full sensory detail. I could smell the sheets. I could feel the cold spot on the floor where Julian's boots had been kicked off.
It should have broken me.
That was the point. She had timed it for the healer's ward. She had timed it for the hour after I lost the pup. She had wanted me to hear it while I was still soft, still bleeding, still capable of being hurt by it.
The recording ended. Estelle's voice came back, sweet as syrup.
*I just thought you should know what you were holding onto. He never loved you, Zora. You were a chore. A bond he had to maintain. He told me that. He told me a lot of things.*
A pause. She was waiting. She wanted to hear me crack.
I pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist.
Then I lifted it away. I set my hand flat on the blanket and I felt the last small warm thing in my chest—the thing that had been whispering, all evening, *maybe he didn't mean to, maybe he's suffering too, maybe—*
I felt it die.
It didn't hurt. That was the strangest part. It just went out, the way a candle goes out when you stop feeding it air. And what was left behind in its place was something else. Something flat and cold and very, very clear.
I opened the mind-link channel deliberately. I let her feel me on the other end.
*Thank you,* I said.
The silence that came back from her was beautiful. She had not expected that.
*Thank you,* I said again, *for making this easy.*
I shut the link. Not slammed—shut. Calmly. The way you close a book you are finished with.
Then I lay still for a long moment, listening to my own breathing, listening to Grandpa Memphis breathing across the strip of floor between us. The ward smelled like antiseptic and lavender. My arm throbbed under the gauze. Somewhere outside, a wolf was howling—long and low and far away, the way wolves howl when they are calling something home.
I reached for the phone Clara had left on the bedside table.
My hand was steady. I noticed that with a distant, clinical interest. I had not held anything steady in hours, and now my hand was steady.
I scrolled to a number I had not called in three years. The contact name was just an initial. M.
It rang twice.
"Zora." My mother's voice. The same voice that had sung me to sleep, the same voice that had told me, the day I left for Crescent Moon, *If he ever makes you small, you call me.* I had never called.
I was calling now.
"Mom." My voice did not shake. I did not let it. "It's me."
"What's wrong."
Not a question. A statement. She knew. Lycan mothers always know.
I told her. I told her flat and clean, the way you read a report. The banquet. The necklace. The herbs on the marble floor. The pillar. The pup. The rejection. I told her my name—my real name, the one I had buried for love—*I am Zora Anderson of the royal bloodline, and your daughter, and I am in the Crescent Moon Pack healer's ward, and I have just lost my child because the Alpha of this pack put his hands on me.*
The line went silent.
One second. Two.
Then my mother said, very quietly: "We're coming."
The call ended.
I set the phone back on the table. I looked at Grandpa Memphis, asleep with his silver pin still on his lapel, and I felt something I had not felt in a very long time.
I felt awake.
