The second link came on the eighth night, and this time I was ready for it.
I'd been lying flat on my back with my eyes closed, breathing shallow, counting the seconds between each exhale. The wolfsbane made everything slower—my heart, my thoughts, the way sound traveled through my skull. But I'd learned that if I stayed still enough, if I let my mind go soft at the edges, Dane's signal could slip through the cracks.
It hit like a fist to the temple.
*Kora—*
I didn't move. Didn't sit up. I kept my body exactly where it was and poured everything I had into holding the connection open.
*I'm here. I'm listening.*
Static swallowed half of it, but his voice came through in bursts, sharp and urgent.
*Six years ago. Hours after your delivery. Male matching Holloway's description seen at the pack hospital rear entrance. Loading an infant into a vehicle.*
My chest went tight. I forced myself to breathe through it.
*Who saw him?*
*Rogue contact. Transported the child to an Appalachian roadside meet point. I have the name—*
The signal buckled. I felt it start to fold in on itself, the pressure behind my eyes fracturing.
*Dane, the name—*
*Can't hold—signal's—*
And then it was gone.
I lay there in the dark with my hands curled into fists against the stone, my nails digging into my palms hard enough to leave marks. My wolf stirred beneath the wolfsbane, a low ripple of something that felt almost like rage, and I let her. I didn't try to calm her. I just held the fragment Dane had given me and turned it over in my mind, slow and careful, like a shard of glass I couldn't afford to drop.
Holloway. At the rear entrance. Hours after I'd given birth.
I'd been so tired that night. I remembered the exhaustion more than I remembered the pain—the kind of bone-deep weariness that makes the room tilt when you try to sit up. They'd brought me the baby wrapped in a soft yellow blanket, and I'd held her against my chest and counted her fingers, her toes, the tiny perfect curve of her ear. Mitchell had been there. He'd kissed my forehead and told me she was beautiful.
I wondered now if he'd been waiting for me to fall asleep.
I didn't sleep after Dane's link collapsed. I lay there with my eyes open and my breathing even, staring at the ceiling I couldn't see, and I built a map in my head. Holloway. A vehicle. A rogue contact. An Appalachian meet point. It wasn't the whole picture. But it was more than I'd had an hour ago, and in this room, that was everything.
Somewhere overhead, footsteps moved across the pack house floor. I pressed my palm flat against the stone and felt the vibration travel through my wrist, my elbow, my shoulder. The world was still turning up there. People were still walking. And my daughter—my real daughter—was out there somewhere, breathing, growing, alive.
I held onto that.
Skyler came the next morning.
I heard her footsteps before I saw her—lighter than Grant's, slower than Holloway's, with a deliberate quality that made my wolf lift her head beneath the water. The door didn't open. She stopped at the small barred window set into the silver-lined steel, and I looked up from where I was sitting on the floor and met her eyes through the gap.
She was wearing the Luna ceremonial pendant.
It hung just below her collarbone, a silver crescent inlaid with moonstone, the same piece Mitchell's mother had given me on our mating day. I'd worn it for six years. It had sat against my skin through every pack assembly, every alliance negotiation, every night I'd stood beside Mitchell and believed I was building something that would last.
Skyler didn't say anything. She just stood there and looked at me through the bars with that same small, neat expression she'd worn at the bonfire—not triumph, not gloating, just a quiet, contained satisfaction. Like she'd been holding her breath for six years and had finally been allowed to exhale.
I looked back at her. I didn't stand. I didn't move. I just sat there with my hands flat on my thighs and my spine straight against the wall, and I let her look.
Her scent drifted through the window gap—lavender and something sharper underneath, something sour that hadn't been there before. Anxiety. She was performing calm, but her body was telling a different story.
I filed that away.
After a long moment, she turned and walked away. Her footsteps faded back up the corridor, and the door at the top of the stairs opened and closed, and I was alone again.
My wolf snarled. It was a low, sustained sound that didn't break the surface but filled my chest like smoke. Not breaking through the wolfsbane. Not yet. But *present*. More present than she'd been since the needle started.
I pressed my hand against my ribs and felt her there, coiled tight, waiting.
*Soon,* I told her. I didn't know if it was true. But I said it anyway.
Grant came that afternoon with Mitchell's message.
He didn't crouch this time. He stood just inside the door with his arms crossed and his face blank, and he read from a folded piece of paper in the flat, professional tone of a Beta executing orders he didn't necessarily agree with but would execute anyway.
"You will be held until your feral instability is certified as resolved by Dr. Holloway. Upon certification, you will be released into pack labor rotation with Omega status. Alpha Mitchell has begun the paperwork reclassifying your pack standing. This is effective immediately."
He stopped reading. He didn't look at me. He just stood there with the paper in his hand, waiting.
I let the silence stretch. Then I said, very clearly, "Tell Mitchell I received his message."
Grant's jaw tightened. For a second I thought he might say something—something real, something that wasn't the script he'd been handed. But he didn't. He just folded the paper, turned, and walked out. The door locked behind him.
I waited until his footsteps faded. Then I reached into my waistband and pulled out the blood confirmation document I'd been carrying since the night they dragged me down here. Twelve days folded against my skin. The paper was soft now, creased and warm, but the ink was still clear.
*Zero shared markers. Unambiguous.*
I smoothed it flat against the stone floor and read it again. Not because I needed to. I had every word memorized. But because it was the one piece of irrefutable truth in this room, and I needed to see it with my eyes, needed to feel the paper under my fingers, needed to know that when everything else had been stripped away—my mate, my wolf, my title, my daughter—this was still real.
I folded it carefully and tucked it back into my waistband.
Then I lay down on the stone, closed my eyes, and waited for Dane's signal to come through the dark again.
