Kasen finds me before the trial floor even clears from Seraphina's applause. He materializes at my shoulder the way he always does, without sound, without warning, and presses a folded pair of sparring wraps into my hands.
"You're up next," he says. "Seraphina wants a demonstration from the Omegas. Consider it an honor."
His voice carries no irony. That's the worst part about Kasen—he never sounds like he's enjoying it.
I look at the wraps. Plain cloth, gray-white, smelling faintly of chamomile and lavender, the calming herbs the pack uses on young wolves before their first shift. Nothing underneath registers. I have spent ten years learning to read a room through scent, and I smell nothing wrong.
I should have known that was the trick.
I wrap my hands the way I've wrapped them a thousand times—crossing at the knuckle, securing at the wrist. The visiting Alphas watch from the dais with idle curiosity. Seraphina sits among them, hands folded, chin tilted, the picture of gracious patience.
I step onto the floor and take my stance.
The first strike is nothing special—a basic palm-heel against the practice dummy, the kind of opening move any pup could manage. My hand connects.
The pain arrives a half-second later, and it is not like anything I have felt before. Not the clean break of bone, not the deep ache of torn muscle. This is fire under the skin, a thousand small mouths biting inward, and when I look down my palm is already dark and wet, threading red through the gray wrap.
Silver. Ground fine enough to hide in herb dust. Ground fine enough that it doesn't announce itself until it's already in the meat of you.
I try to close my hand into the second position and my fingers won't obey. The tendons have already started to seize, swelling around the metal buried in them. I stand there in front of three visiting Alphas with my hands turning into something useless, blood dripping steady onto the practice floor, and there is nothing I can do but stand very still and let them watch it happen.
Seraphina's expression does not change. A small furrow between her brows, a hand half-lifted as though she might rise in concern, and then settling back down because concern that moves too fast looks like guilt.
"Quinn," she says softly, for the benefit of the room. "Perhaps that's enough for today."
I unwrap the cloth with hands that no longer grip properly, fold it as best I can, and bow to the dais. My voice, when it comes, is steady. "Thank you for the honor."
I walk off the floor. I do not look at Dominic. I already know what I will find there—nothing, the particular nothing of a man who has trained himself not to see me.
---
That night, in the Omega quarters, I unwrap my hands under the single working lamp and make myself look.
The damage is worse than the pain suggested. Silver has driven into the meat below both thumbs, and on my right hand, two tendons have pulled tight and wrong, the skin already purpling at the joints. This will not heal clean. This will scar the way the ambush scarred my marrow—permanent, a record written into my body that no one can erase and no one but me will ever fully understand.
And then, beneath the pain, something else moves.
Not silence. Not the hollow absence I have carried since the rejection. A vibration, low and sustained, pressing outward against my ribs like a fist against a locked door. My wolf. Not shifting. Not trying to surface. Just there—furious, awake, waiting.
I press my thumb into the center of my opposite palm, the old habit, and the vibration answers the pressure, a faint echo pushing back.
She isn't gone.
She's furious. And she's waiting for something.
I do the math I've been avoiding. The healer gave me six weeks. Three have already passed. Four remain, and every day since has taken something further from me—my rank, my hands, my hunt, my style stolen and performed for applause I earned and she claimed.
I start, that night, with the wrapping still wet, to calculate what I would need to cross the border. A route. A window when Kasen's patrols thin. A way to move Maren and the sanctuary pups if it ever came to that.
I did not know yet how soon it would.
---
Two days later, before dawn, Maren slips a folded paper under my door.
I read it once standing in the dark, then again sitting on the edge of my cot, because the words do not change the second time.
The order is signed. Demolition crew arrives at dawn, three days from now. The sanctuary den—the only home I have ever had, where Maren and I and a dozen other orphaned pups grew up breathing each other's breath in the dark—will be gone.
I go to the pack house that evening, in the rain, and I kneel on the steps.
