Northridge Café sat on a strip of road that belonged to no pack — neutral ground, the kind of place wolves used when they needed to pretend to be human for an hour. I got there at 9:52, early enough to compose myself. I didn't need to. Ridge was already there.
He sat at the corner table, back to the wall, facing the door. Of course he did. Three years hadn't softened anything about him. If anything, he looked colder, sharper, like something carved rather than born. Dark hair, dark coat, a stillness that made the air around him feel thinner.
He looked up when I walked in, and I watched his face change.
Just for a second.
His jaw tightened. His eyes moved over me — the too-big cardigan, the wrists I could wrap two fingers around, the hollows under my eyes I'd stopped bothering to hide. Something flickered behind his gaze, something violent and grieving at once. Then his hand came down on the edge of the table.
I heard the wood crack under his fingers.
"Ridge?"
He exhaled slowly, and when he spoke, his voice was even. Careful. "Sit down, Luciana."
I sat. He didn't apologize for the table. He didn't explain it. He just folded his hands like nothing had happened, though I noticed he kept them very still after that, like he didn't trust them.
There was a scent coming off him — cedar, and something like cold rain right before it turns to snow. Faint. Familiar in a way I couldn't place, the way a song from childhood sounds familiar even when you've forgotten the words. I told myself it was just memory. Three years of history has its own smell.
"Tell me everything," he said. "From the beginning."
So I did.
I told him about the empty treasury Dexter swore existed. The rationing. The nights I went to bed with my stomach folding in on itself while I told myself it was for the pack. I told him about the rags, the scrubbing, the mind-link I'd overheard, the moonstone pendant glittering against Elsie's throat while allied Alphas were being told I was bleeding Silvercrest dry.
Ridge didn't interrupt once. But I watched his knuckles whiten around his coffee cup, watched a muscle tick in his jaw so hard I thought his teeth might crack. When I got to the part about the Charter — Grant freezing, Elsie fleeing — something in his expression eased, just slightly. Pride, maybe. Or relief.
"You should have called me the day it started," he said quietly.
"I didn't know it had started. He made me believe you were the enemy."
"I know." His voice was low, rough at the edges. "I know exactly what he told you."
I didn't ask how he knew. I was too tired, and too grateful he was here, to interrogate it.
He leaned forward. "Here's how this works. I'm not going to walk into Silvercrest and start giving orders. The moment I do, Dexter turns me into the story — the Lycan Prince seizing pack territory, using you as a puppet. Every Alpha who resents Crown interference will side with him out of principle alone."
"So what do you do?"
"I stay in the shadows. I help you gather evidence — bank records, offshore transfers, testimony. Then we bring it to a Council tribunal, under your founding-blood authority. You speak. You accuse. You win. It has to be your voice, every step. Not mine."
It should have felt like a burden. Instead it felt like the first solid ground I'd stood on in three years.
"He's already rattled," I said. "He'll fight dirty."
Ridge's eyes were flat and certain. "He'll fight the only way cowards know how."
He was right.
By the time I got back to the packhouse that afternoon, Marcus Vale had already called an emergency Council session — convenient, considering how the whispers had spread through the halls before I'd even parked the car. *Luciana's mentally unstable. Luciana starved herself. Luciana's being used by Lycan royals to swallow Silvercrest whole.*
I walked into the Council chamber and felt the temperature drop.
Marcus stood at the head of the table, smug in his tailored vest, hands clasped like a man delivering a eulogy. "With respect, Luciana," he said, not looking at me, "a Luna who hasn't shifted in three years has no wolf to speak of. How can she invoke bloodline authority she cannot even prove she carries?"
Murmurs rippled around the table.
"The Charter doesn't require a shift," I said. "It requires blood."
"Convenient," Marcus said, "that the blood conveniently surfaces the same week she's seen fraternizing with a Lycan Prince."
The vote came fast. Too fast. Table the claim pending further review — passed, seven to five, on a margin so thin it reeked of arrangement.
I sat in the silence afterward, staring at the crest carved into the table, and thought of Ridge's voice at the café: *He'll fight the only way cowards know how.*
He just hadn't told me it would work.
