I made lamb stew.
It sounds absurd to remember that detail now—the specific dish, the way I'd spent forty minutes trimming the meat, the fresh rosemary I'd pulled from the kitchen garden because Jude always said the dried kind tasted like dust. But that's what I remember. The smell of rosemary on my fingers when I set the pot on the stove and stepped out to answer a question from one of the pack omegas about the seating arrangement.
Five minutes. Maybe less.
I didn't think anything of it. The kitchen was never unattended for long. The pack dinner was a routine gathering—twelve wolves, nothing formal, the kind of meal I'd organized a hundred times over three years. I'd learned early that a Luna who fed her pack well earned a different kind of loyalty than one who simply managed them.
Eliana arrived just as I was carrying the first dish to the table. She wore ivory, which I noted because she always wore ivory to pack events now, the same shade as a ceremonial gown. Malcolm pulled out her chair before he pulled out mine.
I set down the dish and went back for the next one.
---
Jude was laughing at something across the table when it happened.
One moment he was reaching for his water glass, bright-eyed and animated the way he used to be before Eliana came back and started rewriting him. The next, his hand missed the glass entirely. His chair scraped. He made a sound I'd never heard from him—a choked, strangled gasp—and then he was on the floor.
Everyone moved at once.
Eliana moved faster.
She was at his side before I'd taken two steps, dropping to her knees with a grace that looked rehearsed, gathering his convulsing body against her chest with both arms. Her face was a mask of terror. Beautiful, perfect terror.
"Wolfsbane," she said.
Not a question. Not a guess. A declaration.
She looked up from Jude's shaking form and her eyes found mine across the table with the precision of a wolf who knew exactly where to look.
"There's wolfsbane in his food."
The room went silent.
Twelve faces turned toward me.
I felt the shift the way you feel a temperature drop—sudden, total, the warmth just gone. Three years of pack dinners, three years of earned trust, and in the space of one sentence it was all suspended, every wolf in the room recalibrating based on Eliana's pointed gaze and the boy convulsing in her arms.
"I didn't—" I started.
Malcolm crossed the room.
I didn't see the blow coming. I should have—I'd been watching him for three years, cataloguing his moods, reading the tension in his jaw and the set of his shoulders. But I wasn't watching him. I was watching Jude, who was still shaking, whose face had gone gray, and I was trying to understand what was happening, how wolfsbane had gotten into food I'd prepared with my own hands in a kitchen I'd managed for three years.
The impact snapped my head sideways. My hip caught the edge of the table on the way down. The floor was cold against my palms.
For a second, nothing. Just the ringing in my ears and the taste of copper and the strange, distant observation that the flagstone was very clean. I'd made sure of that. I always made sure of that.
Malcolm's voice came from above me, rough with Alpha authority, his aura crashing over the room like a wave.
"Confine her to our quarters."
I looked up. His face was a stranger's face—not angry, exactly, but resolved in the way of a man who has already decided and is simply executing the decision. He didn't look at me the way you look at a person. He looked at me the way you look at a problem.
Eliana was watching from across the room. Jude's head rested against her shoulder. Her expression was grief, carefully arranged, and her eyes were calm.
Two pack wolves took my arms. I didn't fight. My wolf was screaming in my chest but my body moved quietly, because three years of measured grace doesn't just stop, even when the floor is still cold under your hands and your face is still ringing.
They walked me down the hall. The lock engaged behind me.
---
I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.
My cheek throbbed. I pressed my fingertips to my mark out of habit—that old, useless gesture—and stopped.
My wolf pressed against my consciousness. Not howling. Not panicking. Just present, with a clarity that cut through everything else like a blade finding bone.
She had been trying to tell me for three years. In every moment of scentless silence, every night I lay awake beside a man whose bond felt like touching glass. She had been telling me, and I had been answering her with patience and faith and the quiet, devastating certainty that if I just waited long enough, something real would grow.
It hadn't.
It never had.
Because this was never my mate.
The thought arrived without drama. No howl, no earthquake. Just the clean, terrible weight of a truth that had always been true, finally allowed to take up the space it deserved.
I sat in the dark, hands folded in my lap, and let myself know it.
This was never my mate.
And somewhere in this pack, a corrupt healer had records that would tell me what else I didn't know yet.
