Ivy POV
I'm still wearing his coat when I walk through the door.
Sylvie hasn't stopped since the gate. She shoves forward the moment I step inside, harder now, his scent everywhere on the coat. I clamp down on her before she can go anywhere with it.
'Stop,' I tell her.
She slows. She doesn't stop.
I pull the coat off and put it in the wardrobe.
My phone buzzes. It’s Ada. I pick up.
She tells me she found someone on the inside. Thomas is alive for now. But there's no way to get him out.
I think about my father. It was the Lycan Council that forced him to carry the blame for the entire pack. Every member's grievance, every wrong decision, every debt with nowhere else to land. They needed a name. They chose his. He had no guilt in it. He was just useful, and already weakened enough that he couldn't refuse.
He didn't fight it. He went.
I watched him leave from the hallway. I was fourteen and I was furious at him for years afterward, the kind of furious that only comes from loving someone completely and feeling like they let you down. I couldn't understand how he could just go. How he could let them take everything without making them fight for every inch of it.
I understand now. When a room full of powerful people has already decided, there's nothing left to fight. He knew that. He chose not to spend what little he had left on a battle already lost.
I'm not going to let Thomas become the same kind of lesson.
"I'll handle it," I say.
"How? There's no way to get him out unless—"
"I'll handle it." I hang up.
Julian comes home in a different mood.
He sets his jacket down and pours a drink and says, "Next time you visit your mother, I'll come with you."
Wariness moves in my chest. He always throws something small out and waits for me to soften around it, then uses that softness as the opening for what he actually wants. I know this move. I've watched him use it a hundred times.
And I'm thinking about Thomas. Julian has standing through Seraphina's bond to the warden. He has never offered to use it. But he said he'd come with me. He has never said that before. Maybe this time I can ask.
I turn around.
"About Thomas," I say. "He's in the Nocturne Facility. No way out without someone with standing to intervene. You have that through Seraphina."
Julian is quiet for a moment. Then: "I'll think about what I can do."
Something loosens in my chest. Just slightly. Just enough to make me feel stupid for it.
He sits down. "But first I want to talk about something."
I should have known. I did know. I turned around anyway.
"A child," he says. "We've been putting this off long enough. It's time."
I have always known this was coming. I knew it when I walked in at sixteen with a blood-sealed contract and a name that still carried weight. I knew it when Meredith looked at me across the table and said my bloodline outranked Selena's. A Lancaster child would carry something that Selena's never could. That's what my blood is worth to this pack. Not to Julian. To Silvercrest. A child from me and the next Alpha heir has lineage no one can argue with. That's the whole of it. That's why I have never let it happen. Not once. Not in all that time.
"And Selena?" I say.
"Two Lunas. It's been done before. Your position doesn't change. You still have everything you have now. This is fair. You should spend your whole life being grateful to me for it."
I stare at him.
He means every word. He loves Selena and he needs what my bloodline gives him and in his head these two things sit side by side without any contradiction at all. He's offering me a title and a roof and the chance to produce his heir and a front-row seat to watch Selena keep everything else. He thinks that's generous. He genuinely thinks I should thank him.
He is never going to understand that I am a person in this room and not an arrangement.
"No," I say.
He stands up. "Then we're done talking."
He walks toward me and his hands settle on my waist from behind. Easy. Certain. Like I said no and it simply didn't land.
Sylvie wrenches hard toward the wardrobe. Silas's coat is in there and his scent hasn't faded and she keeps pulling that direction, restless and certain, in a way that has nothing to do with Julian. I feel the pull through my whole chest and I can't stop it.
Julian's lips come to my neck. His hands move to my chest, squeezing, fingers pulling at the buttons.
Nausea hits so hard it almost takes my knees.
I step out of his grip.
"You've been doing this for days." His voice drops flat. "Enough."
"I have never once treated you badly. The rogue attack, handled. Your cousin, not something I caused. You're putting everything on me and I've allowed it. That stops right now."
I stand there and I let every word come in.
Charity. That's all it is. Every sentence thrown down from a height, and I'm supposed to pick it up and be grateful for the weight of it.
He's never treated me badly. He's been more patient than I deserved. Every bad thing has a cause that isn't him and the math always comes out clean. I know this speech. I could give it back to him word for word.
He never says: he has never once come looking for me when I was gone. He never asked where I was going. He never walked one step behind me to make sure I got home. He has never once asked.
Those things break the math. So he leaves them out.
"I'm not sulking," I say. "Three years ago I came to you with that contract because I had no other move. That was my mistake. But three years isn't too late to correct it. I want to invoke the dissolution clause."
"This is about Thomas." Almost a laugh. "I'm not pulling him out."
"I'm not asking you to. I can't reach the people who can help him while I'm inside this contract. That's the only thing I'm fixing. Just that."
"Then—"
"Severance. Just that."
"Your pack is gone. Your name means nothing outside these walls. No backing, nothing." He steps forward. "Who is going to want you?"
That lands exactly where he aims it.
He moves fast. Both hands grab my arms and he walks me into the wall. Hard. His grip locks around my wrists.
"Say it again," he says. "See what it gets you."
Sylvie doesn't shove forward. She rises.
I rake my nails across the back of his hand.
He sucks in a breath and his grip breaks. I grab my coat, get the door open, hallway, entrance, cold air against my face. I pull my hood up and I run.
Snow driving hard sideways. Behind me, through the wind, his voice cuts.
"Nobody is going to want you."
I run until I can't hear it anymore.
*****
Silas POV
I pick up her letter and read it again.
Vance comes in. The cousin is confirmed in the Nocturne Facility. Discussing prohibited dark arts. Low-level charge, but they're making an example of him. The family bribed the guards. He's alive.
I nod. Vance goes.
That's what I can't get past. Julian Silvercrest is her husband. He's an Alpha with standing, with connections, with a direct line into the Nocturne Facility through his sister's bond to the warden. If Thomas is her family, then Thomas is his obligation. That's how it works. That's what the bonding means.
She should have gone to him. But she wrote to me instead. She came to me for help.
That's the same feeling as the alley.
She's Silvercrest's Luna. She should be the most protected woman in this territory. That's what that title means. And she was in that alley with a sack over her head and no one knew where she was and nobody came.
When I pulled the sack off her head her eyes were wrong. Not frightened the way you're frightened when something bad happened. Frightened the way you are when something bad has been happening for a long time and you've stopped expecting it to stop.
Her bare shoulder. The way her body shook when my coat went around her. She went still for a second, the way someone does when they've stopped expecting anyone to cover them.
That image keeps coming back. I don't go looking for it. It just comes.
What kind of life has she been living in that house for three years.
She finally thought of me. She finally wrote.
What she doesn't know is that I have always known exactly where she is.
