Lilith came alone the first time, three nights after the forest.
She didn't bring Zora. She didn't bring an audience. She stood in the doorway of the basement with a lantern in one hand, her white robe catching the light like she'd dressed for the visit, and she smiled at me the way she smiled at the high table—warm enough to fool anyone who hadn't learned to read beneath it.
"I thought you might want company," she said.
I stayed seated on the cot. I didn't answer.
She took my silence as invitation and sat on the room's single stool, arranging her robe with the same care she gave everything. "You should know," she said, "that Maddox and my father began discussing the alliance six months before your ceremony. Long before he ever stood in front of you and said those words."
I kept my eyes on the stone between us.
"The pendant," she continued, touching her collarbone where the moonstone hung, cool and pale against her skin. "He gave it to me during the second visit. A courting gift, he called it. He said he'd been carrying it around for weeks, waiting for the right moment."
Something in my chest wanted to move. I didn't let it.
"He told me something else," she said, leaning forward slightly, her voice dropping into the register she used when she wanted a wound to land deep. "About you. About the bond." A pause, timed for effect. "He said it felt like a punishment. That a mate who couldn't shift, who was too weak to even manage an Omega's basic strength—he said the Moon Goddess had made a mistake with him. That you disgusted him."
I pressed my fingertips against the inside of my wrist. I held them there, counting the seconds until my pulse settled beneath them.
"Nothing to say?" Lilith tilted her head. The lantern light caught the faint tightening at the corners of her eyes—the first honest thing she'd shown me all night.
"No," I said.
She stayed another minute, waiting for tears, for a crack, for anything to carry back upstairs as a story. When none came, she rose, smoothed her robe, and left without another word. The door locked behind her.
I sat in the dark a long time after that. I let myself feel the shape of what she'd told me—not the cruelty of it, which was old news dressed in new detail, but the timeline. Six months. He had been planning this while I was still scrubbing floors and telling myself patience would be rewarded.
I breathed. I held still. By the time I lay down, my face had already forgotten how to show what my chest still carried.
---
The food stopped the next morning.
No tray came at dawn. None came at midday. By the second evening my hands had begun to shake in a way that had nothing to do with the silver burns, and I understood, distantly, that this was deliberate—Zora's cheerful efficiency applied to starvation instead of scrub water.
On the second day, Zora came for me herself. "Observational duty," she said, hauling me up by the arm. "For the Omegas. You'll learn something."
I learned that I was the lesson.
The training yard was full of junior warriors, restraint drills lined up in rows, and Zora walked me to the center of it with the same bright efficiency she brought to everything. "Omegas make excellent training aids," she announced to the group, loud enough that no one could pretend not to hear. "They heal slow enough to be instructive."
The first hold slammed me into the dirt before I finished processing the sentence.
I won't recount every impact. There were many. My ribs took the worst of it, then my shoulders, then my ribs again as the drill rotated through a dozen hands that didn't know me and didn't ask to. I stared at the ground between holds. I pressed my fingertips to my wrist whenever a wrist was free to press. I did not cry out.
When it ended, I walked back to the basement on my own legs. Every step cost something. I didn't let it show.
My wolf, when she finally spoke that night, wasn't snarling.
*The wolfsbane in the water isn't coincidence,* she said, cold and exact, a voice stripped down to conclusion. *She's suppressing something. She's escalating because she's afraid of us.*
I lay on the cot with my ribs screaming under the blanket and turned this over slowly, the way I turned over everything now. I had the ledger. I had the dates. I had assumed, this whole time, that the wolfsbane was cruelty for cruelty's sake—another tool in Lilith's methodical dismantling of me.
But cruelty didn't explain the precision. The micro-doses. The timing, always before the moments I felt closest to slipping.
Someone suspected what I was. Someone had been managing me the way you manage a threat, not a victim.
I pressed my burned palms together in the dark and held them there until the shaking stopped.
I was running out of time. I understood that now with a clarity that had nothing left in it to soften.
