On the fifth morning, I could not hold the pen steady.
I sat at the small writing desk in the upper wing with the treaty ledger open in front of me and my hand flat on the page, waiting for the trembling to stop. It did, eventually. It always did. I picked up the pen and I kept writing.
The dissolution notices had to be exact. That was the thing that kept me focused when the dizziness rolled in and the words on the page went soft at the edges. Every allied Alpha I had ever sat across a table from — I knew what they responded to, what language made them move, what phrasing would make the notice impossible to misread or delay. The Greywood Alpha respected precision. The Ironveil Alpha responded to formality. The Ashfen Alpha — who had shaken my hand and not Nolan's, deliberately — would understand immediately what a notice sealed with my personal Luna's mark meant, and why.
I wrote each one by hand. I did not rush them.
When the vision blurred, I set the pen down and pressed my fingers against my closed eyes and waited. When it cleared, I picked the pen up again.
The pup moved while I was working on the Ashfen notice — a slow, rolling shift, lower than usual. I stopped writing and put my hand on my belly and held very still. She settled. I exhaled. I finished the sentence I had started.
I told myself the weakness was the pregnancy. I told myself it was the stress, the disrupted sleep, the smell of Alexis's perfume that had seeped into every corridor of the upper wing no matter how many times I opened the windows. I had been telling myself these things for three days.
I did not yet understand that I was being helped toward that conclusion.
---
Downstairs, Elliot Voss was asking questions that no one could answer.
I heard it in pieces — from Sera's careful silences, from the particular tension in Desmond Hale's footsteps when he passed the upper landing, from the way the pack house's rhythm had changed, the way it always changed when something official was happening that Nolan had not prepared for.
The Lycan Court's diplomatic review required complete administrative records. Trade-route agreements. Warrior-training pacts. Alliance documentation with originating signatures. The kind of records that lived, for five years, in the Luna's office archive — the archive that was now empty, because I had taken the ledgers before midnight on the night of the feast, and Alexis had replaced their absence with nothing.
I could picture Nolan's face when he said it. *Being reorganized under the new Luna's administration.* The particular smoothness of a man delivering a lie he has not fully examined for structural weaknesses.
Elliot Voss would examine it. That I knew.
---
The second day I could barely stand, I stopped trying to reach my wolf.
Not because I had given up. Because the reaching itself had become frightening. She was there — I could feel her, the way you can feel a sound that has dropped below the range of hearing, more vibration than noise — but the distance between us had grown in a way that the Alpha-tone suppression alone could not explain. The cage I knew. I had learned its edges, its texture, the particular quality of the silence it imposed. This was different. This was a muffling that came from somewhere deeper, something that was seeping into the space between my wolf and the surface of my own consciousness and filling it with a gray, heavy fog.
I lay on the bed with my hand on my belly and I breathed carefully and I told myself I was tired. I told myself the third trimester was doing this. I told myself I was strong enough.
The pup was quieter than she had been.
I noticed that. I filed it. I did not know yet what to do with it.
---
On the afternoon of the second bad day, I heard footsteps in the corridor that were not Sera's.
Not Desmond's either — too even, too unhurried, with the particular quality of someone who was not trying to be quiet but simply was. They stopped outside the door. There was a pause — not hesitation, something more deliberate than that, like a decision being made or confirmed — and then they moved on.
I lay still and listened to them go.
My wolf stirred, faintly, in the gray fog where she had been retreating. Just once. A single, distant push, like a hand pressed against glass from very far away.
I pressed my palm harder against my belly.
The last dissolution notice was written and sealed in the ledger beside the bed. Fourteen alliances. Every term. Every name. My Luna's seal pressed into each one in dark wax, waiting.
I was not going to send them from inside these walls.
I just had to stay alive long enough to leave them.
