The basement smelled like stone and old wood and something darker underneath — the smell of a place where things are kept that no one wants to see.
Collin didn't speak when he brought me down. The bond pulled me through the pack house hallways, past the kitchen where two Omegas stopped talking the moment they saw us, past the common room where a Delta warrior looked up from his phone and then very carefully looked back down. My feet moved without asking permission. My arms stayed stiff at my sides. I tried to stop at the top of the basement stairs and my knees buckled forward anyway, one step, then another, my hand catching the rail to keep from falling.
He unlocked the door at the bottom and stepped aside to let me through first.
The room was narrow, low-ceilinged, lined with metal shelves. My herb stores took up the back wall — jars I'd spent five years filling, labeled in my own cramped hand. Dried yarrow for fever. Crushed valerian root for sleep. Wolfsbane antidote components in the glass containers I'd saved for because they were the only ones that wouldn't leach. I'd organized them by system: respiratory, circulatory, neurological, infection. It was the only order I'd ever been allowed to build that no one could touch.
Collin walked to the back shelf and picked up the first jar.
"You think you can invoke pack law in my house," he said.
He dropped it.
The glass exploded on the stone floor. Dried elderflower scattered like snow.
I didn't move. I watched him pick up the second jar — the willow bark I'd harvested myself last spring, stripped and dried in the sun for six weeks — and I watched that one shatter too.
"You think Kannon answers to you."
Another jar. The yarrow this time, the good batch, the one I'd been saving for the next flu season.
"You think the Court wants a wolfless Luna standing in a room full of royalty, embarrassing this pack."
He didn't throw them. He just opened his hand and let them fall, one after another, methodical, like he was checking items off a list. The wolfsbane antidote components. The infection poultices. The burn salves. Every jar I'd labeled, every formula I'd tested, every night I'd spent at that table in the clinic grinding herbs by lamplight because the work was the only thing that made me feel like I had a purpose here.
The wolf in my chest was screaming.
Not sound — wolves don't scream, not the way humans do — but pressure, a thrashing thing trying to claw its way up my throat. I felt my hands shake. I made them stop. I watched the last jar hit the floor and I did not move and I did not speak because if I opened my mouth I didn't know what would come out.
Collin turned around. His boots crunched on broken glass.
"You'll resume your healing duties when I decide you're ready to be useful without being difficult," he said. "Until then, you're cut off."
I felt it before I understood what he meant.
The mind-link — the low frequency hum that sits in the back of every pack wolf's head, the constant awareness of the others, the ability to call for help or hear when someone else does — went silent.
Not quiet. Silent. Like a door slamming shut on a room I didn't know I was standing in until it was gone.
I sucked in a breath. My hand went to my chest without permission, pressing against the mark-spot like I could hold the bond in place through my ribs.
"Collin—"
"You're still connected to me," he said. "That's all you need."
He walked past me, up the stairs, and left the door open behind him.
I stood there in the wreckage for a long time. My boots were in a puddle of crushed valerian and shattered glass. The air smelled like herbs and stone and something bitter I couldn't name.
The wolf in my chest stopped thrashing. She went very, very still.
And I started counting.
I counted the jars he'd broken. I counted the ones still intact on the upper shelves, the ones he hadn't noticed or hadn't cared about. I counted what I could rebuild and what I couldn't and how long it would take and what I'd need. I did it the way I'd learned to do everything in this house: with my head down, my hands steady, and my voice silent.
When I was done counting, I went upstairs.
---
Three days later, my mother collapsed.
I was in the clinic — cleaning, because I wasn't allowed to treat anyone yet, because Collin hadn't decided I was useful — when the Omega who lived two doors down from my mother came running.
"She won't wake up right," the woman said. Her name was Iris. She was breathing hard. "She's talking, but she's not making sense, and she's hot, Freya, she's so hot—"
I was already moving.
The Omega grounds were on the east edge of pack territory, small houses with narrow porches and gardens the size of kitchen tables. My mother's door was open. I smelled it before I got inside.
Sweet. Faint. Wrong.
Wolfsbane.
She was on the couch, propped against the armrest, her eyes half-open and glassy. Her skin was flushed, her breathing shallow and fast. I dropped to my knees beside her and pressed two fingers to her wrist. Her pulse was thin and rapid, skipping every fourth beat.
"Mom." I kept my voice low. "Mom, can you hear me?"
She blinked. Her gaze found me, lost me, found me again.
"Freya," she said. Her voice was a whisper. "I don't feel right."
"I know." I pulled down her lower eyelid. The conjunctiva was pale, the vessels too prominent. "I know. I'm here."
I tilted her head back and smelled her breath. There it was again — faint, under the sour-sick smell of nausea — that sweet-rot note that only comes from wolfsbane metabolizing in the blood.
Slow-acting. Multiple doses. Someone had been feeding it to her for days.
The wolf in my chest surged.
It wasn't the thrashing from the basement. This was colder. Sharper. A single, focused pressure behind my sternum that felt like a hand closing into a fist. My vision sharpened at the edges. I could smell everything in the room — the wolfsbane, my mother's sweat, Iris's fear, the faint jasmine perfume on the breeze coming through the open door.
I knew the antidote. I'd made it twice before, years ago, for a Delta who'd been poisoned in a rogue ambush. Purified moonstone extract, distilled in spring water, combined with crushed white sage and administered in three doses over six hours.
The moonstone extract was locked in the Alpha vault.
I stood up. My hands were steady. My mother's eyes followed me.
"Stay with her," I told Iris. "Keep her cool. I'll be back."
I walked to the pack house. I didn't run. Running would have been panic, and panic wouldn't get me what I needed.
Collin was in his office. The door was open. I stepped inside and I did not demand. I did not invoke pack law. I did not remind him that my mother had lived on these grounds for thirty years and deserved the protection he'd promised every Omega under his authority.
I begged.
"She's dying," I said. My voice didn't shake. I didn't let it. "Wolfsbane poisoning. Slow-acting, multiple doses. I need the moonstone extract from the vault. I can synthesize the antidote in two hours. Please."
Collin looked up from his desk. He didn't stand. He didn't reach for the vault key on the chain around his neck.
"That's a serious accusation," he said. "Poisoning an Omega on pack grounds."
"I'm not accusing anyone. I'm asking you to save her."
"And if I do," he said, "what do I get?"
I stared at him.
The wolf in my chest went absolutely still.
"What do you want," I said.
He leaned back in his chair. He looked at me the way you'd look at a hand of cards you're deciding whether to play.
"Tomorrow night," he said. "Pack banquet. You kneel before Shay in front of the entire pack and acknowledge her as the rightful Luna. You say it out loud. You make it clear."
I couldn't breathe.
"Do that," Collin said, "and I'll give you the extract."
I thought about my mother on that couch. I thought about her pulse skipping. I thought about the twelve minutes it would take me to synthesize the antidote once I had the extract, and the six hours after that before the poison would be neutralized, and how many minutes she had left before the damage was irreversible.
I thought about all of it in the space of two seconds.
"Yes," I said.
Collin smiled. It didn't reach his eyes.
"Good," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow night."
I turned and walked out, and the wolf in my chest didn't thrash and didn't scream. She just watched. She counted. She waited.
