I ran.
Bare feet on gravel, on dirt, on the wooden steps of my mother's porch. The vial was hot in my fist. My lungs burned. I didn't slow down.
The door was still open. Iris stood beside the couch, her hands pressed to her mouth. She saw me and stepped back without a word.
My mother's eyes were closed. Her breathing was shallow, each breath a little shorter than the last, like her body was forgetting how.
I dropped to my knees. The vial cap came off in one twist. I tilted her head back with one hand, the way I'd done for a dozen wolves in the clinic, the way I'd been trained. Her jaw was slack. I poured the first dose between her lips.
"Swallow," I said. My voice was steady. Healer's voice. "Mom. Swallow."
She didn't.
The antidote ran down the corner of her mouth, pale silver against her skin, and pooled on the couch cushion. I tilted her head further. I massaged her throat with two fingers, the way you do when someone's swallow reflex is compromised. I whispered things I don't remember. I poured the second dose.
Her throat didn't move.
I pressed two fingers to her wrist. Her pulse was there — thin, irregular, skipping every other beat now. I counted. I timed it. I calculated how much wolfsbane was in her blood and how much the antidote could neutralize and how long it would take.
Twelve minutes. That's how long it had been since Collin handed me the vial. Twelve minutes between his word and my mother's body.
Her pulse stopped at 11:52.
I felt it go. The thread under my fingers just — stopped. No flutter. No final beat. Just absence.
I didn't move. I kept my fingers on her wrist. I counted to sixty, the way you're supposed to, to make sure. I pressed harder, searching for the pulse in a different spot, the way you do when you think you've missed it.
I hadn't missed it.
I sat back on my heels. The vial was still in my other hand, half-full. I looked at it. I looked at my mother. I understood, with the clinical precision of someone who has spent five years identifying the exact moment damage becomes irreversible, that twelve minutes was not an accident.
It was a measurement.
Twelve minutes: the exact distance between Collin's word and Collin's meaning. The exact length of time it takes to kneel, to synthesize, to run. The exact margin by which a promise becomes a lie.
I set the vial down. I pulled my mother's head into my lap. Her skin was still warm. Her hair smelled like the rosemary soap she made herself every spring.
The wolf in my chest didn't move. She didn't thrash. She didn't scream. She just watched.
Iris was crying. I heard it behind me, quiet, the kind of crying you do when you're trying not to be heard. I didn't turn around. I sat with my mother's body and I smoothed her hair back from her face and I did not cry.
From the pack house, half a mile away, I could hear the banquet noise. Laughter. Voices. The low hum of a pack that had just watched their Luna kneel and was now celebrating the wolf who'd taken her place.
I memorized the sound.
---
I carried her back myself.
Iris offered to help. I shook my head. I lifted my mother — she was light, lighter than I expected, the way bodies are when there's nothing left inside them — and I walked.
Through the Omega grounds. Across the gravel path. Past the gardens where she used to grow my herbs. I didn't hurry. I didn't hide. I walked through the pack house because it was the fastest route to the burial grounds, and I didn't care anymore who saw.
The hallway was full. Wolves coming back from the banquet, still talking, still laughing. They saw me. They saw what I was carrying. The talking stopped.
They stepped aside.
No one helped. No one spoke. They just moved to the walls and let me pass, and I walked down the center of the corridor with my mother in my arms and I looked at every single one of them.
Kannon was standing at the edge of the main corridor. He met my eyes. His face was pale. His mouth opened like he was going to say something.
He didn't move.
I registered it. I filed it. I kept walking.
I took her to the Omega quarters and I laid her down on her own bed. I pulled the quilt up to her shoulders. I folded her hands over her chest. I did everything the way it's supposed to be done, the way she would have wanted, with care and with precision and without a single wasted movement.
When I was finished, I sat beside her and I looked at her face and I understood that I would never forgive myself for kneeling.
Not because it was the wrong choice. Because it was twelve minutes too slow.
---
I buried her the next morning.
The sun wasn't up yet. The sky was grey and flat and cold. I dug the grave myself on the Omega grounds, in the small plot behind her house where she used to grow herbs. The earth was soft. It didn't take long.
I wrapped her in the quilt. I placed her herb-stained gardening gloves beside her, the ones she wore every morning, the ones that smelled like rosemary and sage and soil. I lowered her into the ground.
I covered her with earth.
I didn't pray. I didn't speak. I just worked, steady and methodical, filling the grave one shovelful at a time. My hands didn't shake. My breathing stayed even. I did it the way I did everything: with my head down and my voice silent and my wolf locked so far inside me I couldn't feel her anymore.
Kannon arrived partway through.
I didn't hear him coming. I just looked up and he was standing at the edge of the clearing, still in his formal clothes from the banquet. He didn't speak. He didn't offer to help. He just stood there and watched me bury my mother alone.
When I finished, I pressed my thumb to the earth over her grave once. I memorized the spot. I stood up.
Kannon was still there. His face was pale. His jaw was tight. I looked at him and I saw exactly what I expected: guilt that had nowhere to go.
I said nothing.
I walked past him, back to the pack house, back to the clinic, back to my healing duties. Because that was what I did. That was what I'd always done.
Inside me, the wolf that had stirred three days ago had gone still again.
But it wasn't the stillness of something dormant.
It was the stillness of something that had decided.
