Yasmin did not say hello.
"Give me his address," she said. Her voice was low and shaking, the kind of shake that came before something got broken. "Give me his address and I will be there before the sun comes up. I will pull his spine out through his throat."
"Yasmin."
"I will feed it to Michaela."
"Yasmin." I sat down on the floor next to the parchment. My knees felt like paper. "I don't need rage. I need you to listen."
She went quiet. I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line, ragged and furious, and I loved her for it in a way that had nothing to do with the plan.
I told her everything. Flatly. In order. The mind-link that cracked open at four-seventeen in the morning. The jasmine on his throat. The bonfire, the vow, the mark going cold. Michaela lifting her chin at me across the flames like a woman claiming a stretch of land. Then I told her the other things—the ones I had not known I was collecting until I laid them down. The Silverfang negotiation Michaela had walked into a pack assembly and claimed like it was hers, when it had been my letters, my scent on the envelopes, my hand on every clause. Fifteen crates short on a wheat shipment last spring. A tribute figure in the archive ledger that did not match the number I had heard Darwin say out loud to a courier. Warrior rotations with holes in them shaped exactly like the nights Darwin was gone.
When I was done, Yasmin was silent for what I counted as ten seconds.
Then: "Tell me what you need."
I told her.
---
I did not sleep for the next four nights.
I wrote by hand on kitchen parchment in the blue hour before the pack woke, the pencil worn to a stub by the third morning. Rogue movement along the eastern territories—I had a map of it in my head from Silverfang border reports I had carried in sealed envelopes and, once, in a torn one. Cross-referenced with warrior debriefs I had overheard while scrubbing the mess hall floor. Gaps in Lycan Court data that any Omega with a working memory could have identified, if any Omega had been listening.
I had been listening.
When it was finished, the brief was seven pages of dense, small handwriting. No name at the top. No rank. No cover letter. I fed it into Yasmin's secure channel with a single line beneath: *For the Prince, if he wants it.*
I did not ask for anything. I offered something of value. Then I put the handset back under the floorboard and went downstairs to scrub a hallway.
---
On the fifth morning I stopped flinching.
Michaela came into the kitchen while I was carrying a stack of clean linens and said, "You. Latrines. Training ground. Before the warriors get there."
I did not lower my eyes. I did not nod. I looked at her the way you look at a shape in a window you are trying to identify, and I said, "Fine."
She blinked.
Then, louder, for the she-wolves at the long table: "Careful, Omega. Wouldn't want you to trip. That neck of yours must feel light without a mark on it."
They laughed. Two of them. The other three did not.
I held Michaela's gaze. I did not move my face. I counted, in my head, to four. Her fingers rose to the base of her throat and dropped again before she caught them.
"I'll get the linens delivered first," I said. My voice was flat. Not soft. Not sharp. Flat. "Then the latrines."
I walked past her.
Behind my ribs, my wolf did not stir. She only leaned—pressed forward like something that had stopped hiding, watching through my eyes.
---
Over the next three days I made the ledger visible.
Not loud. Not accusing. I dropped observations the way a woman drops a coin—precise, small, in front of exactly the people who would bend to pick it up.
To the quartermaster, while stacking sacks: "The wheat shipment last spring was fifteen crates light. Did that ever get reconciled?" I did not wait for the answer. I kept stacking.
To a cluster of warriors coming off the southern patrol: "Was anyone assigned to the ridge that night in March? I remember carrying breakfast out and the rotation slate was blank for four hours." One of them opened his mouth. Another put a hand on his arm.
To Rowan Callahan, in the hallway outside the archive, quiet as breath: "The tribute ledger says twelve thousand. I heard Darwin tell the courier nine."
Rowan looked at me for a long moment. He had brown eyes, and he was the only person in Ironveil who had ever handed me a cup of water without checking first whether anyone was watching.
"I'll check the rotation records tonight," he said. "Quietly."
He did. The next morning he passed me in the corridor and did not stop walking, but he said, low, "Two of your numbers match mine."
I kept walking too.
That night, low-ranking warriors at the mess hall began exchanging the kind of glances that meant a question had been asked in a room where no one had yet decided who would answer it.
Inside my chest, my wolf pressed forward another inch.
*Not yet,* I told her.
But soon.
