By sunrise, her scent was everywhere.
I smelled it before I opened my eyes — the sharp, floral bite of Alexis's perfume layered over something animal underneath, rolled thick into the corridor air like she had walked every wall of the Alpha wing and pressed herself against each one. Which, I later learned, she had.
I lay still for a moment, one hand flat over the small curve of my belly, and listened.
Down the hall, in the quarters that had been mine and Nolan's for five years, I heard her voice. Not shouting. Instructing. The studied cadence of a woman practicing a role in front of a mirror she believed no one else could see.
"Move the linens to the west closet. All of them. And I want the windows open by seven every morning — I don't sleep in stale air."
A pause. Then Sera's voice, flat and even: "Yes, Luna."
The word landed in the corridor like a coin dropped on stone. I heard it exactly the way Alexis wanted me to hear it.
My wolf pushed against the cage in my chest — a hot, silent shove — and I breathed her back down. Not yet. Not for this.
I got up. I dressed carefully. I walked to the healer's wing for my scheduled check, because the pup was still moving and that was the only thing in the pack house that still belonged entirely to me.
---
The healer's rooms smelled of eucalyptus and clean cotton. She pressed the cool disk of her stethoscope low on my belly, listened, nodded, and did not meet my eyes when she asked how I was sleeping.
"Well enough," I said.
She wrote something down. She did not ask a second question.
When I walked back to my quarters, the door was ajar. I had left it closed.
I stepped inside. Nothing was overturned. Nothing was obviously missing. The bed was made. The curtains were where I had left them. My hand went to my throat before my eyes went to the bedside table, and I knew — I knew in the second before I looked — that the space beside my water glass was empty.
The bloodstone was gone.
My fingers closed on nothing at my collarbone. I stood very still. Then I walked to the table, opened the drawer, closed it. Walked to the dresser. Opened each drawer in order. Checked the floor beside the bed. Checked under the pillow. Checked the pocket of the robe I had worn the night before, though I already knew.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
My mother's essence. The last warm thing of hers I had ever touched. The pendant she had worn against her own throat when she was carrying me, the enchantment humming so low that I had learned as a child to fall asleep to it. I had worn it every day of my adult life. I had reached for it when I could not reach for her.
My wolf shoved against the Alpha-tone lock, hard, and the grief came up behind her like a wave with nowhere to break.
I pressed my palm flat against my belly. The pup fluttered — small and insistent, that same steady *I am here.* I closed my eyes and I breathed with her. In. Out. In. Out. The trembling in my hands took longer to stop than I wanted it to. Long enough that I made a note of it. Long enough that I understood, sitting there in the wreckage of a bedroom Alexis had walked through like she already owned it, that grief was going to be a thing I scheduled around, the way I had once scheduled treaty renewals.
When I stood up, my face was composed.
I did not go looking for her. I already knew where the pendant was, and I already knew what she was going to do with it.
I wanted her to do it in front of witnesses.
---
She summoned them that afternoon.
I did not attend. I stood at the upper landing again, out of sight, and I listened to Alexis's voice carry up from the main hall — that studied Luna-cadence, slightly too loud, slightly too deliberate.
"Shadowridge has one Luna now. Only one. And there will be no more confusion about whose bloodline this pack answers to."
A pause. I could picture the pendant lifted, the light catching the stone.
Then the sound.
Not a crack. A shatter. Sharp and final and wrong, the enchantment splitting audibly as the stone broke — I felt it, somewhere behind my sternum, a small collapsing pressure, like a door I had not known was still open finally closing.
No one in the hall spoke.
I held the railing and I did not go down.
---
Later, after the hall had emptied and Alexis had gone to Nolan's quarters wearing the smell of her own victory, I saw the middle-aged attendant — the one who had dressed my hair for four years and never once spoken above a murmur — cross the main hall with a folded cloth in her hands.
She did not look up at the landing. She did not need to.
She knelt on the stone floor where the pendant had shattered and, with slow, careful fingers, she gathered every fragment she could find. The largest pieces first. Then the smaller ones. Then the dust, brushed gently into the center of the cloth. She folded the cloth in on itself, tucked it inside her apron, and walked out through the servants' corridor without a backward glance.
My hand went to my throat again. Closed on nothing.
But something in my chest — quieter than my wolf, older than grief — went very still and very attentive, the way Elliot Voss had gone still in the great hall the day before.
I watched the empty floor where the fragments had been.
And I began, again, to count.
