The pack house had a different sound to it that morning. Warriors straightened without being told. Servants moved faster, quieter. Even Natasha, passing me in the corridor with an armful of towels, dropped her voice instead of using it as a weapon.
"The Lycan Prince is here," Iris whispered when I asked. "Envoy business. He's staying through the banquet."
I didn't know what a Lycan Prince was supposed to look like. I'd heard the word Lycan the way you hear the word king in a fairy tale — distant, decorative, nothing to do with scrubbing floors in Oregon.
I saw him for the first time from the end of the east corridor, a mop in my hands, my eyes down the way three years had trained them. Tall. Dark hair, dark coat, the kind of stillness that made the warriors flanking him look restless by comparison. A man behind him — his Beta, I guessed — matched his pace without needing to be told the rhythm of it.
I kept my head down and kept moving.
He stopped.
I felt it before I understood it — the change in the air, a held breath from a man twenty feet away. When I looked up, just for a second, his jaw had gone tight on one side, and his eyes had found me with an intensity that had nothing to do with an Omega mopping a floor.
Three seconds. Maybe four.
Then it was gone. His face smoothed back into whatever face princes wear, and he continued down the corridor like nothing had happened.
I told myself it was nothing. I had a floor to finish.
—
The pack meeting was held in the east hall, the diplomatic table set with Shadowvale's good linens — linens I'd have to launder by hand tonight, most likely, once Ethan's guests were done wrinkling them. I moved along the perimeter with a tray of refreshments, invisible in the way I'd perfected. Ethan sat at the head of the table, laying out territory maps for Alpha Voss's alliance. Natasha sat beside him, her hand resting on his forearm at intervals, like punctuation.
The Lycan Prince sat across from them, unreadable, his attention moving over the maps with a precision that made Ethan's presentation sound thinner every time the Prince asked a question.
I came around the far side of the table to refill a water pitcher.
The scent hit him before I'd even reached the chair. I saw it happen — his head lifted a fraction, like a wolf catching wind on a still day, and his eyes came straight to me. Not polite. Not diplomatic. Direct, in a way that made my pulse do something strange and unfamiliar in my throat.
His jaw tightened. Held. One second, two, three.
I froze with the pitcher half-tilted, water pooling at the lip of the glass I was supposed to be filling. Something in my chest — the same pressure that had been building for weeks — surged toward the surface, curious, straining, like it recognized something I didn't.
I shut it down. Finished pouring. Moved on.
Neither of us said a word. But I felt his eyes on my back for the rest of the meeting, and something told me this wasn't the last time.
—
The pack run was called for sundown, in rain that had been falling since noon and showed no sign of stopping.
"Full territorial circuit," Ethan announced to the assembled wolves. "Everyone shifts." His gaze found me at the edge of the crowd. "Except the wolfless Omega. She'll run human, as Luna Natasha's pace partner."
A ripple of laughter went through the pack. Natasha's smile was radiant.
I didn't argue. Three years had taught me the exact shape of a losing argument.
The course was six miles of forest trail, rock, and mud, and I ran every step of it on two legs while shifted wolves streamed past me on four, their strides eating the ground I fought for inch by inch. Natasha's silver-brown wolf circled back twice to trot beside me, just long enough to be seen doing it, before pulling ahead again.
By mile four, my legs had stopped being legs. By mile five, something in my knee gave with a wet, tearing pop, and I went down hard into the mud, the freezing rain filling my mouth before I could turn my head.
I couldn't get up.
The pack came around the bend behind me — dozens of wolves, paws thundering, and none of them slowed. Ethan's black-and-silver wolf, massive and unmistakable, came last. His paw landed inches from my face as he stepped over me without breaking stride.
I lay in the mud and let myself feel it. All of it. Cold and clean and precise, no suppression, no swallowing it down for later. The fury didn't burn. It settled, deep in my bones, alongside the pressure that had stopped waiting weeks ago.
The pack passed. The rain kept falling.
Then a shape crouched beside me — human, warm hands under my shoulders. Marcus, water running off his hair, said nothing as he lifted me out of the mud and carried me toward the healer's cabin.
He didn't need to say what he was thinking.
Neither did I.
