The wolfsbane finished its work forty minutes in.
I felt it happen—not all at once, but in degrees, like a light dimming room by room until the whole house goes dark. My wolf had been whimpering since I left the pack house, small and pale and furious, throwing herself against the Alpha-tone command with everything she had. Then the whimpering thinned. Then it stopped.
The warmth went with her.
I'd never felt cold like this. Not the sharp bite of winter air that makes you pull your coat tighter, but something structural, patient, hunting me from the outside in. It found my fingers first—turned them stiff and clumsy, then numb, then something worse than numb, a distant ache that didn't feel like part of me anymore. The wind stripped my breath away before I could draw a full one. My lungs burned. The snow reached my knees in places, and every step forward felt like wading through something that wanted to hold me down.
I kept walking.
The command was still there, woven into my spine like a leash I couldn't see. It didn't care that I couldn't shift. It didn't care that my wolf had gone silent. It just pulled, steady and absolute, and my body followed because it had no choice.
The road disappeared into white. No landmarks. No phone. No coat. Just snow and wind and the faint, animal understanding that I was alone in a way I had never been alone before.
My fingers stopped hurting at the thirty-minute mark. I told myself that was progress.
—
Two hours in, I saw lights.
A roadside diner materialized through the storm like something out of a fever dream—faded sign, fogged windows, the smell of coffee and heating vents cutting through the cold. I pushed through the door and felt warmth hit my face so hard it hurt.
The place was nearly empty. A trucker at a booth by the window. An older woman behind the counter wiping down mugs. And at the far end of the counter, shoulders squared and coffee steaming in front of him, Derek Walsh.
Damian's Delta. One of his patrol wolves. I knew him the way you know someone who's never once looked you in the eye—always present, never speaking, the kind of enforcer who didn't need to be told what the Alpha wanted because he already knew.
He saw me immediately.
His expression shifted—surprise first, then something colder, sharper. He stood, set his mug down with a deliberate clink, and turned to face the room.
"That's the rejected Luna," he said. Loud enough for everyone to hear. "From Ironveil. She's got no business here."
The woman behind the counter looked at me, then at Derek, her hand stilling on the mug. The trucker didn't even glance up.
"Ma'am," the woman said quietly, not meeting my eyes, "I'm gonna have to ask you to leave."
I looked at Derek. Just looked, the way I'd looked at Damian the night before, the way I'd looked at Ethan in the hallway. My hands were shaking. My vision was blurring at the edges. I could feel the cold still clinging to me, patient, waiting for me to step back outside so it could finish what it started.
Derek's jaw ticked. He shifted his weight, just slightly, like something in my silence unsettled him more than shouting would have.
I turned and walked back out into the blizzard.
The door swung shut behind me. The warmth was gone in an instant.
—
I don't know how long I walked after that. Time stopped meaning anything. There was only cold, and wind, and the command still pulling me forward through drifts that wanted to swallow me whole.
Then I saw the overpass.
It rose out of the white like a skeleton—concrete and shadow, the wind slightly less lethal beneath its span. I stumbled toward it, my legs barely holding, and found a discarded military parka crumpled against a support pillar. Stiff with cold. Intact. Left behind by some human I would never know.
I wrapped it around myself with fingers that didn't feel like mine anymore and lowered myself to the frozen ground, knees drawn to my chest.
Above me, through gaps in the overpass structure, fireworks cracked the black sky.
Gold first. Then silver. Bursts of light and sound from the nearest town, close enough to hear, impossible to reach. New Year's Eve celebrations. People warm and safe and counting down to midnight while I sat beneath a highway overpass with no wolf, no warmth, no way home.
I pressed my palm to my sternum. The bond was still there, faint and cold, a thread I couldn't cut no matter how much I wanted to. My wolf had been silent for over an hour. I couldn't feel her anymore—not her rage, not her grief, not even the small, stubborn flicker of heat she used to carry in the back of my ribs.
Just cold.
A memory surfaced without permission. Damian in the pack infirmary, three years ago, shaking and gray with wolfsbane poisoning. I'd sat beside him for four days without sleeping, my hands steady on the IV line I'd rigged myself because the pack healer was away on a run. I'd counted drops. I'd measured doses. I'd learned the exact math of keeping someone alive when their own body was trying to kill them.
The memory dissolved back into cold.
My heartbeat slowed. The fireworks cracked overhead—gold, then red, then a long white silence that felt like the world holding its breath.
My eyes closed.
Somewhere very deep and very far away, my wolf whimpered once. Faint. Final.
Then she went completely still.