Sophie came to my door on the fourth morning with a tray in her hands and a smile that didn't reach past her teeth.
"Breakfast," she said, setting it on the narrow table beside the cot. "Marcus says you need to keep your strength up. Medicinal protocol for unstable she-wolves."
She said it like she was doing me a kindness. Like the words medicinal protocol weren't just another way of saying poison.
I looked at the tray. Porridge, pale and thin. A cup of something herbal that smelled wrong—not bitter the way wolfsbane was bitter, but close enough that my body recognized it before my mind did. My stomach turned over.
"Thank you, Luna," I said.
Sophie's smile sharpened. She liked that word in my mouth. She let it sit there a moment before she turned and walked out, her heels clicking down the corridor with the confidence of someone who believed she had already won.
I waited until the sound faded. Then I poured the tea into the crack between the floorboards and scraped the porridge into the cloth I kept folded under the cot. I would bury it later, in the narrow strip of dirt behind the servants' quarters where no one bothered to look.
My hands shook. Not fear. Silver. Always silver now, a fine tremor that lived in my bones and never quite stopped. I pressed my palms flat against my thighs and counted my breaths until the shaking eased enough to think.
Marcus came at noon with the twice-daily dose Emmett had ordered. He didn't meet my eyes. He never did anymore. He pressed the needle into my arm, depressed the plunger, and withdrew without a word. But as he turned to leave, I saw him glance at the tray on the table—the empty cup, the untouched porridge—and something flickered across his face. Not guilt. Not quite. Something closer to calculation.
He left. I listened to his footsteps retreat down the corridor, then fade entirely. I closed my eyes and added it to the list in my head: additional suppression, administered through food, bypassing Marcus's direct oversight. Sophie's doing. Had to be.
I would need proof.
—
The terminal blinked awake at 2:53 in the morning, the screen casting a pale glow across my hands. My credentials held. They always held. Emmett had stripped me of everything that mattered and forgotten to strip me of the one thing that didn't: access.
I pulled up the financial records first. Pack discretionary account, controlled by the Luna. Sophie's account now. Three transfers over two weeks, each one routed to an external supplier I didn't recognize. The amounts were small enough not to trigger an audit but large enough to procure concentrated tinctures in bulk.
I copied the files. My hands didn't shake. Not here. Not when I was working.
Then I pulled the banquet hall footage.
I had avoided it the first night. I told myself I didn't need it, that the medical wing recording was enough. But I was lying to myself, and I knew it. I needed to see it. Not for evidence. For something else. Something I couldn't name.
The file loaded. The timestamp read 8:47. I watched myself lift the glass. I watched the wine hit my tongue, watched my face change—confusion first, then pain, then nothing as my legs gave out. I watched the glass shatter. I watched the blood spread.
And I watched Emmett.
He was twenty feet away, his hand resting at the small of Sophie's back. He didn't move. Not when I fell. Not when Vera screamed. Not when the pack healer ran forward and the warriors began shouting for space. He stood there, his hand on Sophie's back, and watched me bleed out our pup on the floor he had made me scrub three days later.
I watched it twice. Then I transferred the file and logged out.
In the servants' quarters, I lay on the cot and pressed two fingers to the cold place on my neck. My wolf was still silent. Still buried. But somewhere deeper than that, in a place the wolfsbane couldn't reach, something was keeping a ledger. Every dose. Every lie. Every moment he chose to stand still.
I would give it all back to him. Not in rage. Not in chaos. In a single, unbreakable testimony.
—
The letter arrived in the morning, delivered to Emmett's Beta by a Silverfang runner who didn't stay for a reply.
I was scrubbing the great hall floor when the Beta carried it past me, his face tight. I kept my head down and my hands moving, but I listened. Wolves always talked louder than they thought they did.
"Silverfang's pulling out," the Beta said, his voice low and clipped. "Vera Holt. Formal withdrawal. She cited concerns about pack stability and the treatment of ranked wolves at the banquet."
There was a long silence. Then Emmett's voice, cold and flat: "She was always looking for a reason."
"She saw Lena collapse," the Beta said quietly. "She was standing three feet away."
Another silence. Longer this time.
"Burn it," Emmett said.
I heard the crumple of paper. I heard footsteps retreat toward the hearth. I kept scrubbing.
That evening, Emmett paused in the doorway of the Luna suite—Sophie's suite now, redecorated in pale blues and silvers, every trace of me erased. I was passing in the corridor with the mop bucket, invisible the way Omegas were supposed to be invisible. He didn't see me. He was looking at the room, breathing in.
His face changed. Just for a second. Something confused. Something almost pained.
He inhaled again, deeper this time, and his jaw tightened. Then he stepped inside and closed the door.
I stood in the corridor with the mop in my hands and the ghost of wild honeysuckle clinging to the air between us—a scent that shouldn't have been there, a scent that was mine, that the bond had burned into his wolf's memory and wouldn't let go no matter how many times he told himself it was gone.
I turned and walked back to the servants' quarters.
Behind me, through the closed door, I heard Sophie's voice rise, sharp and demanding. I heard Emmett's reply, low and tired. I didn't stay to listen.
I had work to do.
