The royal court smelled like snow and old stone, even though it was warm inside. Vance walked me through halls taller than anything Ironridge had ever built, his jacket still around my shoulders, his grip steady under my elbow like he thought I might shatter if he let go. Maybe I would have.
Then the doors at the end of the hall opened, and I stopped thinking about anything except staying upright.
The Lycan King was bigger than I expected, even though every story I'd ever heard said he would be. He rose from a chair that looked more like a throne pretending not to be one, and the air in the room changed the second he stood — pressure, the kind that made my knees want to buckle out of pure animal instinct. I locked them and stayed standing. I'd knelt enough for one lifetime.
Alaric crossed the floor toward me slowly, like a man approaching something he didn't trust himself around. Three feet away, he stopped. His nostrils flared once. Twice.
I watched a king come undone in real time.
His face didn't crumple, not exactly. It was worse than that — it went perfectly still, the way a held breath goes still, and his eyes, gold-flecked and ancient-looking, dropped to my stomach and stayed there.
"Say your name," he said. His voice had dropped so low I felt it more than heard it.
"Bella Greene." My own voice came out cracked, scraped raw from three days of walking. "I was Luna of Ironridge. I'm not anymore."
"That scent." He said it like an accusation, like I'd stolen something. "That is my son's bloodline." His jaw worked. "That is *my son.*"
"I know," I said. "I didn't know until three nights ago. I have proof — papers, a healer's confession, a name on a vial—"
"The ritual. Now." He didn't raise his voice, but the words landed like a command shouted across a battlefield. A woman in gray robes was already moving, already carrying a shallow silver basin toward us, and I understood, distantly, that I had no choice in this even if I'd wanted one.
I didn't want one.
"Your wrist," the healer said gently.
I held it out without hesitation. What did I have left to protect? They could cut me open and I'd have nothing left to lose that Nolan hadn't already taken.
The blade was thin, almost gentle. Three drops of my blood fell into the basin, dark red against silver, and the healer murmured words in a language older than any pack law I'd ever studied. For a moment nothing happened. I heard my own heartbeat, too loud, and somewhere behind it, a smaller flutter that wasn't mine.
Then the basin lit gold.
Not a glow. A blaze — light pouring up out of liquid like something had been unlocked, throwing shifting gold across the ceiling, across Alaric's face, across the stunned, silent guards lining the walls.
A woman's voice broke the silence with a sound I can only call a sob torn loose after being held too long.
Seraphina crossed the room before I even registered she'd moved, and then her arms were around me, fierce and shaking, her face pressed into my hair. She smelled like lilies and grief and something warmer underneath both.
"He's alive," she said into my shoulder, over and over, like she couldn't stop. "Some part of him is alive."
I stood there and let a queen weep on me, my own eyes burning, my hand pressed flat against her back because I didn't know what else to do with it.
Alaric hadn't moved. He stared at the gold light in the basin like it might vanish if he blinked. When he finally turned to me, his composure had come back together, but wrong somehow — reforged into something harder.
"Whoever did this to you," he said, and every syllable carried the weight of every law I had ever been afraid of, "will answer to the Crown."
I believed him. God help me, I believed him completely.
---
They gave me a room with a bed too soft to trust and a Lycan Guard posted outside the door like I was made of glass and gold both. That night, from the window, I watched Alaric walk the length of the hall alone and stop outside a door I hadn't noticed before — plain, unremarkable, except for the way his hand rested on the frame like it might crumble under his palm.
He stood there a long time. Then he closed it, quietly, and walked away.
I sat cross-legged on the bed with Buster's absence sitting in my chest like a stone — I hadn't let myself think about him in three days and now I couldn't stop — and pulled my journal from the bottom of my bag, corners soft with ten years of handling.
Date. Dosage. Symptom. Date. Dosage. Symptom.
I worked through the night, turning ten years of silent suffering into something with edges sharp enough to cut.
