The footsteps came back.
Not Cole's this time. Heavier. Unhurried. The walk of a man who owned the ground he walked on.
I was already standing when the door opened.
Tate stepped inside carrying a tin cup. Simple. Unremarkable. The kind of cup you'd see in any pack kitchen. He held it loosely, the way you'd carry coffee to a desk, and the casualness of it made my wolf go absolutely silent.
Still. Watchful.
"Alyssa," he said. His voice was even. Quiet. Almost kind.
I looked at the cup. Then at him.
Something in the air hit me—faintly bitter, medicinal, underneath the smell of stone and damp earth. My wolf recognized it before my conscious mind did. She slammed herself against my ribs so hard I nearly staggered.
Wolfsbane.
"You don't have to do this," I said.
"I know." He set the cup on the small ledge beside the door. His expression was calm. Regretful, even. The same face he'd worn when he performed his apology in our bedroom. "You made it necessary."
"I made it necessary." I kept my voice steady. "I found the ledgers. That's what I did."
"You couldn't leave it alone." He moved toward me, unhurried. "If you had just been what you were supposed to be—Luna, mother, partner—none of this would have happened. I didn't want this, Alyssa. I want you to know that."
I backed up until the stone wall pressed cold against my shoulders.
"Flora's son is the Morrison heir," he continued. Matter-of-fact. Like he was explaining pack logistics. "He's been the heir for three years. Your pup—" He paused. "Your pup is a complication. A bloodline dispute waiting to happen. I can't allow that."
"He's your child," I said. My voice cracked on the last word. I hated that it cracked.
Something moved across his face. Not guilt. Something closer to inconvenience.
"Sit down," he said.
"No."
He reached for the cup.
My wolf exploded.
I launched myself at him before he could close the distance—not a calculated move, not strategy, just pure maternal fury driving my body forward. My shoulder hit his chest and he stumbled back a step, the cup tilting. I grabbed for it, trying to knock it from his hand. He caught my wrist.
His grip was iron.
"Stop," he said.
Not the Alpha tone. Just his voice. And somehow that was worse.
I clawed at his hand with my free arm. My wolf was surging, pushing toward the shift, but I was five months along and the transformation would—I couldn't—
I drove my knee upward. He turned his hip and took it on his thigh, barely flinching. He was an Alpha in his own territory, in full health, and I was pregnant and sedative-soft and running on nothing but terror and love for the child I was carrying.
He forced me back against the wall. One hand pinned my wrists above my head. The other raised the cup.
"It'll be quick," he said. "I'm not trying to hurt you."
I twisted my head away. He caught my jaw, fingers pressing into my cheeks, forcing my mouth toward the cup's rim.
The smell hit me full force—bitter, chemical, wrong. My wolf howled. I howled with her, the sound tearing out of my throat raw and ragged, and I felt the liquid touch my lips—
The wall came apart.
Not the door. The wall.
Stone and timber exploded inward in a single detonating crash, and the sound was so enormous it knocked Tate sideways, the cup spinning from his hand and clattering across the stone floor. Dust billowed. I slid down the wall and hit the ground on my knees, coughing, one arm wrapped around my belly.
Through the dust and the ringing in my ears, I heard wolves.
Not Ironveil wolves. Something different. Bigger. The controlled, devastating force of animals that had been trained by the best Alpha on the East Coast and pointed at a single target.
Tate's guards lasted less than a minute. I heard it without seeing it—the sounds of a brawl that was never a contest, brief and absolute and merciless.
Then the dust shifted, and my father walked through the broken wall.
Alan Moore. Alpha of Silvercrest. He was in human form, which somehow made him more frightening than any wolf. His eyes swept the room once—Tate on the floor, the tin cup, the wolfsbane smell still hanging in the air—and something moved across his face that I had never seen there before.
Not Alpha authority. Not tactical calculation.
Raw, devastating fury. The kind that has no performance in it.
He crossed the room in four strides and dropped to his knees in front of me.
"Alyssa." His voice was low. Shaking slightly.
"Dad." The word came out small. I hadn't called him that in years.
His arms came around me—careful of my belly, careful of everything—and he lifted me against his chest the way he had when I was a child who'd fallen from a tree in Silvercrest's woods.
Behind us, I heard his warriors subduing Tate. Heard Cole's voice cut off mid-sentence.
I should have felt triumph. I'd planned to feel triumph.
Instead I felt the warmth of my father's arms and the cold burn spreading from my lips, and I knew—with a quiet, terrible certainty—that the wolfsbane had already done something I couldn't take back.
My wolf went very still.
And the pup stopped kicking.
