I did not sleep.
I sat on the edge of the cot until the window turned gray, and Seraphine paced under my skin the whole time — a low, restless heat behind my ribs that would not settle. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the cabinet door in the kitchen swinging shut in the dark.
At six, I stood up. I put on the plain dress I'd worn the day before. I walked down the servants' stairs in bare feet because I did not want anyone to hear me coming.
The kitchen was empty.
My breakfast dish was already set out on the counter — a bowl of oats going cold, a mug of water, and, beside them, a small white saucer with two clear capsules on it. The same saucer. The same two capsules. Every morning for three years.
I picked one up.
*Don't put it in your mouth,* Seraphine said, and her voice was so sharp it made my teeth ache.
I didn't. I cracked it open over the counter.
A fine pale-green powder spilled out. It smelled like something you'd find under a rock — sour, mineral, wrong. Seraphine recoiled so hard I felt her flinch behind my sternum.
I opened the second one. Same powder. I opened the one on the saucer beside it, and the one in the small brown bottle in the drawer where the healer's supplies were kept, and the three sealed ones in the pantry marked *H. Palmer — daily.* Same. Same. Same.
My hands were shaking. Then, at some point I could not name, they stopped.
I moved through the cabinets the way I had cleaned them for three years — I knew every hinge, every warped shelf. Behind the flour tin was a section of paneling that had always sat a quarter-inch proud of the wall. I had thought it was warped wood. I put my thumbnail under the seam and pulled.
The panel came away.
Inside was a shallow cavity, and inside the cavity were the vials. Neatly labeled. Neatly dated. A rack of them, arranged by month, going back three years exactly. Someone had cared about the order. Someone had made sure the doses were consistent. Someone had understood, with the precision of a chemist, how narrow the margin was between a wolf that stayed asleep and a wolf that died.
I stood there and I counted them.
Thirty-six vials.
One for every month I had scrubbed his floors. One for every month I had pressed my thumb to his mark and thought I was loved.
The kitchen doorway darkened.
I did not turn around. I already knew.
Wheels. The soft rubber squeak of them on tile. He stopped just inside the door. His breath was too loud in the quiet.
"Hadley."
I turned then. Slowly.
He was in a hospital chair — someone had wrapped his left leg, and there was gauze around his ribs from where his own body had fought him during the ceremony. His face was a bad color. His eyes went straight to the open capsule between my fingers, and I watched him understand, for the second time in twelve hours, that he had lost.
The wolfsbane dust drifted down from my hand and settled on the counter between us. Neither of us spoke.
I closed my fist around the vials.
"Hadley," he said again, softer. He had found a voice from somewhere. "Whatever you think you're looking at — "
"How long."
I did not raise my voice. I did not need to. Seraphine sat behind my throat and the room adjusted itself to her weight.
He wet his lips. "You don't understand what — "
"How long, Callum."
He didn't answer. His jaw worked. His hand gripped the wheel of the chair and released it.
"Who helped you."
His eyes flicked, just once, toward the hallway. Toward wherever Declan was. He caught himself, but it was already done.
"That's all I needed," I said.
He reached for it then — the Alpha tone. I felt him gather it, felt him pull it up from somewhere deep the way a man reaches for a weapon he has always trusted. "You will *stand down.* You will put those vials back where you found them and you will — "
It hit me and slid off.
It hit the cabinets, the tile, the air between us, and it dissolved into nothing. I watched it happen on his face — the moment he realized the tone was leaving his mouth and arriving nowhere. His pupils blew wide.
"I'm filing a formal petition with the Lycan Council," I said. Level. Almost kind. "This morning."
"Hadley — "
"The vials will go with it. The labels. The dates. Your handwriting is on them, Callum. I checked."
Something in him cracked, and what came out was not authority. It was fear — a fast, ugly fear, the kind an animal has when it realizes the trap has been sprung on the wrong side of the door.
"You go to the Council," he said, and his voice had gone thin, "and I will declare you rogue before you cross the state line. I still have Alpha authority in this pack. I will have you *hunted.*"
I looked at him.
I looked at him for a long, slow moment, and I let him see me looking.
"Your Alpha authority," I said quietly, "was the first thing the clearing saw fail last night."
His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
I stepped past his chair. He did not try to stop me — could not have, even if he had tried. I walked out of the kitchen with thirty-six vials of wolfsbane cradled against my chest and the empty cabinet gaping open behind him like a mouth that had finally been made to speak.
Behind me, I heard the wheel of his chair squeak once, and then stop.
He did not follow.
