The axes came at dawn.
I heard them before I saw them—three flat strikes, evenly spaced, the sound carrying through the cold air and up through the stone of the Omega quarters. I got to the window in time to see six warriors circling the old oak with ropes and blades, Derek standing off to the side with his arms crossed and his jaw set like a man watching something he had not agreed to but would not stop.
No announcement had gone out. No reason given. Just a line item, the way Derek had told me the night before, flat and administrative: *The oak by the east wall comes down tomorrow. Alpha's order.*
I pressed my hand to the cold glass and watched them work.
That oak had held up the sky the night Aiden told me he loved me. We had stood under it in the dark, his hands cupping my face, and he had said the words the old way, the way our grandparents' generation still used sometimes—not *I love you* but *I choose you, under moon and root, for as long as the roots hold.* I had cried. He had laughed at me for crying and then kissed me until I stopped.
The hollow near the base held every letter he wrote me after. Small things. A folded page slipped into my palm before a pack meeting. *You looked tired today. Rest tonight. I'll cover your patrol.* I never let myself think about how many of those letters had come from a man who no longer existed.
The first real strike hit true. The trunk groaned—a long, splitting sound, deep enough that I felt it in my back teeth before I heard it in my ears. Then it fell, slow and then all at once, and the impact went through the ground and up through the floor of the pack house and into the soles of my feet.
I did not cry.
I waited until the warriors moved to the far side to deal with the branches, and then I walked out, slow, one hand under the weight of the pup, and I knelt by the shattered stump before anyone thought to stop an Omega from kneeling near a fallen tree. My fingers found the hollow. The letters were still wrapped in cloth, dry, untouched. I pulled them free and pressed them flat against my abdomen, under my dress, and walked back inside like a woman who had simply gone out for air.
That night I hid them in the lining of my cot, stitched in with a healer's needle Maren had left me weeks ago for reasons neither of us had said aloud.
My wolf pressed against my ribs, faint, half-buried under whatever Camilla kept feeding into my food.
*Still here,* she said. *Still here.*
---
Aiden's study smelled like cedar and old paper, the same as it always had. Camilla was already seated in the chair by the window—my chair, once, though no one in the room would say that out loud. The locket caught the lamplight at her throat.
On the desk between us sat a branding iron. Silver-tipped. The handle carved with a sigil I did not recognize—clean lines, deliberate, commissioned.
"The mark on your neck," Aiden said, not looking up from the paper he was signing, "is a scar from a previous arrangement. It will be corrected tonight."
He said it the way he corrected patrol schedules.
I did not beg. I had learned, over three years, exactly what begging cost and exactly how little it bought. I looked at him instead—at the smooth, polite blankness where a man used to be, a man who had once cupped my face under an oak tree and called it a choice under moon and root.
Camilla watched me. A small smile surfaced at the corner of her mouth and was gone before Aiden turned his head.
"Sit," Aiden said.
I sat.
He held the iron himself. I do not know why that detail mattered to me, but it did—that he did not delegate it, that his own hand brought the heat to my skin. The metal glowed faint orange at the tip.
I looked at the wall above Camilla's head. A painting of the lake, blue and still.
When the iron touched my neck, the pain arrived in two parts—the fire of it, and beneath the fire, something deeper, a scream that came from the mate bond itself, from the tissue that had once carried his voice into my blood. My wolf screamed with it, high and shattering.
I bit through my own lip.
I did not make a sound.
Camilla's smile did not move this time. She let me see it.
The iron lifted. Smoke curled from my skin. Somewhere behind my sternum, my wolf had gone silent—not gone, I told myself. Not gone.
Just waiting.
