I've been Luna of the Silverfang Pack for seven years. I know what wolfsbane smells like.
It's faint at first — a chemical sharpness hiding under something sweeter, the way a bad feeling hides under a normal Tuesday. I caught it the moment I stepped into my mother's room, chamomile tea still warm in my hand, and my wolf went rigid before I even understood why.
There was a woman at Matilda's bedside.
She was beautiful in that precise, deliberate way — dark hair pinned back, white blouse, the kind of posture that says I belong here without needing to announce it. She was leaning toward my mother with a small smile, her voice low and honeyed, saying something about a revolutionary new treatment for cognitive decline. A clinical vial sat on the bedside table. Unmarked. The kind of unmarked that isn't an oversight.
My mother was nodding along, the way she nods at everything now — not because she understands, but because the fog is kind enough to make her agreeable.
I stood in the doorway for exactly three seconds.
Then I stepped back into the hallway and waited.
I'm not impulsive. I never have been. Seven years of leading a pack teaches you that the worst thing you can do in a crisis is move before you know what you're moving toward. So I stood under the fluorescent lights with my chamomile tea and I breathed, and I catalogued: the wolfsbane under the sweetness of the vial, the floral-sharp scent coming off the woman herself — something I recognized, something that had been living on Enzo's collar for weeks — and the absolute, bone-deep certainty that whatever was happening in that room was not a treatment.
She came out four minutes later.
I stepped into her path.
'I need to see your clinical trial documentation,' I said. 'And your pack healer authorization for whatever you just administered to that patient.'
I kept my voice even. I didn't raise it. I didn't need to — my Luna aura does the work when I let it, threading through the words like a current, low and unmistakable. I watched her face.
She was good. Her expression held for three full seconds — composed, professional, faintly puzzled, the look of a healer who has never been questioned and finds it mildly inconvenient. Then her eyes flashed. Just once. Wolf-gold, bright with panic, gone almost before it registered.
Almost.
She turned and walked out of the facility. Not running. Just walking at the pace of someone who has decided this conversation is over and is not interested in being told otherwise.
I let her go.
I went back into my mother's room, set the chamomile tea on the table, and picked up the vial she'd left behind. I didn't open it. I didn't need to. The wolfsbane was clear enough through the glass — faint, concentrated, nothing that belonged anywhere near a human nursing home or a legitimate cognitive treatment protocol.
My mother looked up at me with her soft, unfocused eyes.
'Are you the new girl?' she asked.
'Yes,' I said. 'I'm the new girl.'
I sat with her for an hour. I held her hand. I drank my tea.
I didn't cry until I was in the car.
---
By the time I pulled back into Silverfang territory, my hands had stopped shaking and my mind had gone somewhere very quiet and very cold.
The floral-sharp scent on that woman was the same one I'd been finding on Enzo's collar for weeks. I'd told myself it was a pack member, a visiting she-wolf, something innocent. I'd told myself a lot of things.
The vial was wolfsbane. Concentrated, unregistered, with no legitimate application I could name.
And the woman who'd been administering it to my defenseless mother had run the moment I pushed back.
I sat in the driveway for a long moment, engine off, listening to the rain start against the windshield. Then I went inside.
---
Enzo came home at nine.
I was in the kitchen when I heard his key in the lock, and I made myself stay where I was — hands flat on the counter, breathing steady. I heard him pause in the entryway. He could scent me, I knew. He always could.
'Stella.'
His voice was careful. That careful tone he uses when he already knows something is wrong.
'There was a woman at my mother's bedside today,' I said. I didn't turn around. 'She was administering an unregistered serum. Wolfsbane-derived. No documentation, no authorization.' I paused. 'Her name is Lorelei Burke.'
The silence behind me lasted two seconds too long.
I turned.
His face did something complicated — a flash of something raw and unguarded, there and gone so fast I might have missed it if I hadn't been watching for exactly that. Then the Alpha composure came down like a curtain, smooth and practiced, and he crossed the kitchen toward me.
'I didn't know she was there,' he said. 'Stella, I swear to you—'
'Don't.' I held up one hand. 'Don't use the bond right now.'
Because I could already feel it — his anguish bleeding through the mate mark on my neck, warm and insistent, flooding me with the particular ache that always makes my arguments feel smaller than they are. My wolf surged toward him. I pulled her back.
He stopped. His cedar-and-smoke scent wrapped around me, and I noticed again, with a clarity that frightened me, how faint it was. I used to be able to smell him from across the pack house. Now I had to be standing close enough to touch.
'She's not a threat,' he said quietly. 'I need you to trust me.'
'I do trust you,' I said.
I kept my voice perfectly level. I did not tell him what I was planning. I did not tell him about the vial I'd taken from my mother's room, now sitting in my jacket pocket. I did not tell him that the scent on Lorelei Burke's skin was the same scent I'd been finding on his collar for weeks, and that I'd finally stopped pretending I didn't know what that meant.
I just looked at him — at the weight he'd lost, at the shadows under his eyes, at the Alpha who used to fill every room he walked into and now seemed to be taking up slightly less space than he used to — and I said goodnight.
---
The guest bedroom is at the end of the hall. I moved in three weeks ago, quietly, without making it a conversation. Enzo hadn't pushed. That, too, told me something.
I lay in the dark and pressed two fingers to the mate mark on my neck — an old habit, one I don't even notice anymore — and I went through the inventory I'd been avoiding for weeks.
The weight loss. The pack runs he'd skipped — three of them now, which the younger wolves had started to notice. His scent, fading like a candle burning down to nothing. His wolf, absent in ways an Alpha's wolf should never be absent.
And Lorelei Burke, sitting at my mother's bedside with an unmarked vial and a honeyed voice, wearing a scent I recognized from my own husband's collar.
I stared at the ceiling for a long time.
Then I made a decision.
