The fruit basket arrived on a Wednesday.
It came with a small card tucked beneath a sprig of dried lavender. No name. Just three words in clean, neutral handwriting: *Get well soon.* The Delta on door duty logged it as a standard pack sympathy gift and set it inside without a second look.
I waited until Cora's night shift ended. Until the corridor went quiet and the only sound was the low hum of the infirmary ventilation and the distant rhythm of the night-shift Delta's breathing through the wall.
Then I dismantled the basket.
The false bottom was thin—compressed fiber board, painted the same wicker brown as the weave above it. I worked my thumbnail along the seam until it gave. Inside, wrapped in a square of oil cloth and sealed with wax, was a small glass vial.
Moonroot extract. I recognized the color before I even opened it—a deep, translucent green, the shade of still water in a shaded pool. The same Moon-orchid groves that produced Riley's elixir. The same neutral California territory where my brother was now safe.
Elliot's contact had done good work.
I sat with the vial in my palm for a long moment. The infirmary was dark except for the thin line of light under the door. My pup shifted against my ribs, slow and drowsy, and I pressed my free hand flat over her.
*Almost,* I told her silently.
Then I broke the wax seal and drank.
It tasted of cold earth and bitter flowers. Something deep and mineral, like stone after rain. My wolf—still curled in the wounded corner of my mind, still too weak to pace—lifted her head.
I felt her press close. Not with strength. Not with the surging, electric presence she used to carry before the bond-severing left her hollowed out. Just close. Present. The way an injured animal presses its side against something warm and solid and real.
*We survive tonight,* I told her.
She didn't answer in words. She simply stayed.
I lay back against the pillow, the empty vial closed in my fist, and let the compound settle into my blood.
Outside, the pack slept. Hudson slept. Harlow slept, wrapped in stolen scent and borrowed confidence.
I closed my eyes and waited for morning.
---
He came on the fourth day.
I knew it would be him. Not Cora. Not a Delta with a tray. Hudson himself, because this was the kind of thing he would want to watch personally. He had always needed to be in the room for the things that mattered to him.
The door opened at half past nine. He was alone.
No tray. No healer trailing behind him with a clipboard. No witness of any kind. Just Hudson in a dark grey suit, his tie a deep charcoal, his cufflinks catching the morning light. He looked like a man making a routine visit. He had even arranged his expression into something approaching warmth—the particular warmth he used for pack members who were grieving, soft and measured and just slightly sorrowful.
He was carrying a covered bowl.
He pulled the chair close to my bedside and sat down. Set the bowl on the cabinet. His movements were unhurried. Deliberate. The movements of a man who believed he had all the time in the world.
"The pack physician prepared something for you," he said. His voice was gentle. Husbandly. "A strengthening broth. For you and the pup."
He lifted the cover.
The smell hit me before the steam cleared.
The herbal base was familiar—the same blend Cora had been bringing for weeks, the same bitter undertone of valerian and dried nettle. But underneath it, threaded through every molecule of warm air rising from that bowl, was the metallic bite of silver-ash so concentrated it made my wolf flinch even through the antidote's protection. Not the gradual, incremental dosing of the past two weeks. Not a slow erosion.
This was the killing measure.
He had brought enough to end it tonight.
I looked at the bowl. The surface of the broth was smooth. Pale gold. It looked like something a careful, attentive mate would prepare for a sick and weakened wife.
Hudson watched my face. His expression didn't change—that patient, practiced mask of concern holding perfectly in place. But I had lived beside this man for years. I knew the tells he didn't know he had. The way his fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around the edge of the bowl. The way his breathing slowed, just slightly, into the measured rhythm of someone waiting to confirm a result.
He believed he was about to watch something die.
"You need to keep your strength up, Morgan," he said softly. "For the pup."
I looked at the bowl.
Then I looked at him.
I reached out and took it from his hands.
