The courtyard smelled like pine resin and morning cold when Camilla walked out carrying the dish.
I saw her before most of the pack did. She came through the side archway in a cream-colored wrap, her hair loose, the locket catching the pale light at her throat. She moved with the unhurried ease of a woman who knew exactly where every eye in the courtyard would go.
They went to her.
The training demonstration was already underway—two Deltas sparring in the center ring, Gamma Holt calling corrections from the rail—but it stopped. Not because anyone ordered it to. It just stopped, the way sound stops when something louder enters the room.
"I made something for our pregnant Omega," Camilla announced. Her voice carried without effort, warm and clear and precisely loud enough. "In the spirit of Luna generosity."
She held the dish out toward me.
Forty pairs of eyes moved from her to me. I felt them land.
The pup was sitting low today, pressing against my hip with every step, and I had been standing near the east wall for the last hour watching the sparring because Aiden had told me, through Derek, to be visible at pack functions. Present. Accountable. The word Derek had used was accountable, and I had not asked what I was accountable for.
Aiden stood at the elevated platform rail. He looked at the dish. He looked at me. Then he gave a single, small nod.
I walked across the courtyard.
The stone was uneven under my feet. I remember noticing that—the small gap between two flagstones near the center ring, the way the morning light made it easy to miss. I remember thinking I should not trip. That tripping in front of forty wolves would be worse than whatever was in the dish.
I took it from her hands.
Camilla smiled. "Eat," she said softly, just for me. "You need your strength."
The first bite hit my tongue and I knew.
Bitter. Underneath the herbs, underneath whatever she had used to mask it—sharp, unmistakable, the specific bitterness that had been sitting at the back of my throat for months in smaller doses. I had learned to swallow past it. I had told myself it was the food. The stress. The pregnancy.
Forty wolves were watching.
Aiden was watching.
I took another bite.
The third bite was when my hands stopped working correctly.
It started in my fingers—a fine, rapid tremor that moved up my arms before I could catalog what was happening—and then my wolf screamed. Not the quiet, muffled sound she had been making for weeks. A real scream, high and desperate, and then she dropped. Not retreated. Dropped. Like something cut loose from a height, falling through a depth I had never felt the bottom of before.
The dish hit the stone.
Then I did.
The courtyard went sideways. Cold flagstone against my cheek. My body was doing something I was not telling it to do—seizing, pulling inward, every muscle contracting at once—and I could hear the sound it made against the stone but I was very far from it, watching from somewhere near the back of my own skull.
I heard Camilla say something. I could not parse the words.
I heard Aiden's voice, even and unhurried: "Help her up."
And then his footsteps, moving away. Not toward me. I tracked them by sound across the courtyard, up the three steps to the observation platform, and I heard him say something to Camilla—low, private—and I heard her laugh, small and warm.
Maren's hands found my shoulders before the seizure had finished. She did not say anything. She just got her arms under me and moved, and the last thing I saw before the healer's wing door closed behind us was the training demonstration resuming in the center ring.
---
She sat beside my cot for a long time before she spoke.
The lamp was low. Outside, the pack had gone in to supper. I could hear the distant sound of it through the stone wall—chairs, voices, the ordinary noise of an evening.
"I need you to listen carefully," Maren said.
I turned my head toward her. My body felt scraped out. The pup was still, which frightened me more than the seizure had.
"The wolfsbane in your food is not accidental." She said it the way she set bones—direct, without apology for the pain. "It has been coming from Camilla for months. The dosage has been increasing. It is calibrated, Amelia. Someone who knows healer protocols designed this."
I stared at the ceiling.
"I have been documenting it," she continued. "Dosages, timing, likely sources. Everything. In my journal. No one else can read my shorthand."
I pressed two fingers to the scar on my neck. The skin there felt strange—numb at the center, oversensitive at the edges.
"She's been suppressing your wolf," Maren said. "Deliberately. Progressively."
The lamp flickered. I watched it.
"Is the pup safe?"
The question came out smaller than I intended. I felt Maren go still beside me—a specific stillness, the kind that precedes a carefully chosen answer.
She waited one beat too long.
"Yes," she said.
I heard the beat. I stored it somewhere behind my sternum, next to the sound of Camilla laughing from the observation platform, next to the weight of forty wolves watching me eat.
I did not ask the follow-up question.
I was not ready for what lived inside it.
