The Pack Banquet is scheduled for three days after my demotion. I know what it is before the invitation arrives—Seraphina's first real performance as Luna, with visiting wolves from three allied packs and enough witnesses to make whatever she does to me official.
I dress in the Omega gray they left folded outside my door. The fabric is rough, meant to mark rather than clothe. I braid my hair back tight and check my hands. Still steady. My wolf is silent, a hollow space where her presence used to hum. I press my thumb into my palm once, then stop. No one is here to see it, and the gesture feels like something I used to do when I still believed comfort was coming.
The pack-house is already full when I arrive. Ranked wolves line the long tables, voices layered over the clink of silverware and glass. The visiting Alphas sit near Dominic at the head table—two men and a woman, all carrying the particular ease of wolves who have never had their rank questioned. Seraphina sits beside Dominic, his mark visible on her neck even from across the room, her hand resting on his forearm like a claim she is still making.
Kasen sees me first. He does not speak. He points to the floor near the center aisle where a bucket and brush wait.
I walk to it. The room does not go quiet—that would require people to stop and acknowledge what is happening. Instead the noise continues, a deliberate blanket of conversation that makes space for cruelty without naming it.
I kneel. The stone is cold through the thin fabric. I pick up the brush.
Seraphina's voice carries from the head table, light and pleasant. "Quinn, a little more effort on the corner there. We want our guests to see Shadowvale's standards."
I scrub the corner. My hands move in steady circles. I learned a long time ago that the fastest way through humiliation is to complete the task without hesitation, without giving anyone the satisfaction of watching you break pace.
But my wolf does not know that.
She rises without warning—a sudden, desperate surge that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with instinct. My hands tremble. The brush stills. I feel my irises shift, silver bleeding through brown, and I know without looking up that people can see it.
Dominic's voice cuts through the room.
It is not loud. It does not need to be. The Alpha tone sits underneath it like a frequency that bypasses thought and goes straight to the spine.
"Down."
My wolf slams back so hard I lose my breath. My knees hit the stone—I was already kneeling, but now I am pressed flat, forehead nearly touching the floor, gasping like something vital was just ripped out through my ribs.
The room is silent now.
I hear Seraphina laugh. It is soft, delighted, the sound of someone watching a performance go exactly as scripted.
I do not look up. I reach for the brush with shaking hands and continue scrubbing.
No one speaks. No one moves. The visiting Alphas look at their plates. One of them—a woman with gray streaking her dark hair—meets my eyes for half a second before turning away.
I finish the section. I move to the next. My wolf does not try again.
When the task is done, I stand, take the bucket, and walk out through the kitchen without waiting for dismissal. Behind me, the noise resumes.
---
My quarters are off the kitchen—a storage room that still smells faintly of onions and preserves. There is a cot, a chair, a narrow window that does not open. I set the bucket down and sit.
My wolf stirs again in the dark.
This time I let her.
The shift starts slow—heat spreading through my chest, bones beginning their familiar rearrange. I close my eyes and wait for the pull, the clean snap into wolf form that has been mine since I was thirteen.
It does not come.
The heat builds. My bones shift halfway and stop. My skin prickles with fur that does not fully surface. I am caught between forms, neither human nor wolf, and the pain is not sharp—it is dull, grinding, the pain of something trying to break through a wall it cannot breach.
I wait. I breathe through it. I let my wolf scrabble and push and fail.
After ten minutes, the heat fades. The bones slide back. I am left sitting on the cot in human skin, shaking, cataloging.
The rejection damaged her. The bond-severance left her half-locked. She can start the shift but cannot complete it.
I press both palms flat on my thighs and stare at the wall.
This is the damage. This is what I am working with.
I need information.
---
Maren comes at dawn. I hear her soft knock and open the door to find her holding a cloth-wrapped bundle—bread, still warm, and a piece of dried meat she must have stolen from the kitchen.
"You didn't eat last night," she says quietly.
I take the bundle. "I need a favor."
She glances down the corridor, then back at me. Maren is small, Omega-ranked since birth, with the particular skill of being invisible when she needs to be. We grew up in the sanctuary den together. She is the only wolf in Shadowvale who still looks at me like I am a person.
"What kind?"
"I need to see a healer. Neutral territory. No pack affiliation. No records."
Her eyes widen slightly. "Your wolf?"
I nod.
She is quiet for a moment, thinking. Then: "There's a woman in the neutral market. She doesn't ask questions. I can get you there, but it has to be during the supply run. Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow works."
Maren hesitates, then reaches out and squeezes my hand once. "Quinn—"
"I know," I say.
She leaves before anyone sees her.
---
The healer is older, her hands weathered, her eyes sharp. She examines me in a back room that smells like sage and something bitter I do not recognize. I sit on a wooden stool while she presses her palms to my chest, my spine, the base of my skull.
After five minutes, she steps back.
"Your wolf is dying," she says. No preamble. No softening.
I do not blink. "How long?"
"Six weeks. Maybe less. The rejection damage combined with whatever you did to your marrow—silver, I'm guessing—has left her on a countdown. If you do not find a new bond or trigger a true awakening, she will go dormant. Permanently."
"Permanently," I repeat.
"You will be human-locked. No shift. No wolf. No bond capacity." She pauses. "For most wolves, that is a death sentence. Not a literal one. But close enough."
I sit with that. Six weeks.
"What triggers a true awakening?"
She shakes her head. "Proximity to a fated mate. Extreme trauma. Lycan blood, if you have any in your line." She looks at me. "Do you?"
"I don't know."
She hands me a small vial of dark liquid. "This will help with the pain when she tries to surface. It won't fix the damage. Nothing I have will."
I pay her with the last of my coin and walk back to Shadowvale with the vial in my pocket and a clock ticking in my chest.
Six weeks.
I add it to the inventory.
