Days passed.
I knew because the light changed—the angle of it through the bedroom window, the way it shifted from gold to gray to gold again. The Omega they sent with my meals was a young girl named Petra who kept her eyes on the floor and set the tray down like she was afraid I might bite. I didn't blame her. She was reading the room the way all pack wolves read rooms: by figuring out who held power and performing accordingly.
She wasn't wrong about what she saw.
I ate everything they brought me. I slept when I was tired. I did not cry, did not rage, did not press my fingertips to my mark the way I used to. That habit was gone. There was nothing left to reach for through that bond, and I was done pretending otherwise.
Through the walls, I heard things.
Jude's recovery was the first thing I catalogued. By the second morning, the voices in the hallway were relieved—laughing, even. By the third day, someone mentioned he'd been back at training. I lay on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling and turned that detail over in my mind like a stone I was checking for weight.
Genuine wolfsbane poisoning didn't work that way. I knew this because I had spent three years managing the health records of a pack that trained with silver and wolfsbane resistance protocols. Recovery took a week minimum, sometimes two. It left wolves weak and nauseated long after the convulsions stopped.
Jude was at training in three days.
I filed that away. Carefully. Without expression.
Malcolm never came.
Not to ask what happened. Not to check whether I was injured—my face had bruised badly; I'd seen it in the bathroom mirror, the purple-yellow spread across my cheekbone. Not to tell me what the investigation had found, or whether there was an investigation at all. Not to ask me a single question about the food I had prepared with my own hands for a boy I had raised for three years.
He didn't need to ask. That was the thing I kept coming back to, in those quiet days with the tray on the floor and the light moving across the wall.
He hadn't needed evidence. He'd needed a reason.
Eliana had given him one.
---
The confinement order lifted without ceremony on the fifth day. Petra arrived in the morning without a tray, just a short knock and the door swinging open, and that was apparently that.
No apology. No explanation. No Malcolm.
I dressed carefully. Hair pinned back, posture straight, the same measured grace I'd been performing for three years. I walked out of that room and back into the life I'd been building, and I watched what had happened to it while I was gone.
It didn't take long to see.
At the morning administrative meeting, two pack members who would normally have brought their questions to me went directly to Eliana instead. She answered them with the easy confidence of someone who had been doing this for a while—not learning the role, inhabiting it. The Gamma, a gruff wolf named Terrence who had once told me I ran the tightest pack calendar he'd ever seen, took his training schedule questions to her without a glance in my direction.
I sat at the table and said nothing.
I was mapping. That was what I told myself, and it was true. I needed to understand the full shape of what had been built around me before I dismantled any part of it. Every detail mattered: who deferred to whom, which alliances had already shifted, how deep the architecture went.
But underneath the mapping, my wolf was very, very still. Not dormant. Not patient. Still in the way a wolf goes still before it moves.
---
I worked at night.
The financial records I'd already photographed. The travel logs. The healer visit documentation, the transfers to Arthur Vance's account, thirty-six months of payments that didn't correspond to any treatment I remembered receiving.
I pulled pack law next. Rejection procedures, formal language requirements, the legal framework for severing a mate bond under documented grounds of fraud or harm. I read it three times until I had the prescribed language memorized.
Then I drafted the papers.
I, Sabrina of the Silvercrest Blood, reject you, Malcolm of the Ironvale Pack—
I stopped. Read it back. The words sat on the page with a weight I hadn't expected, not because they hurt but because they didn't. Three years, and the absence of pain felt like its own kind of answer.
I wrote the letter to my father next. I didn't send it yet. But I wrote it—every date, every transfer, every discrepancy—and I sealed it and put it in the interior pocket of my coat, against my ribs.
Arthur Vance's clinic was a twenty-minute drive from the pack house. Malcolm visited every Wednesday for routine checks. It was Tuesday evening.
I set the rejection papers in a folder. I photographed my documentation one final time. I chose my coat—dark, practical, nothing ceremonial—and hung it by the door.
I didn't tell anyone where I was going.
I went to bed, and for the first time in days, I slept without dreaming.
