The mind link came up like a radio with a dying battery.
I closed my eyes and pressed my palm flat against my chest. *Casey. Casey, it's me. You there?*
Static. A flicker. Then nothing.
That was normal. Casey was an Omega in a pack twelve miles over the border, and our link had been thin since we were kids. Thin, but never dead. I tried again anyway, sitting on the edge of the motel bed with Liv still asleep behind me, her small hand curled around my sleeve.
*Casey.*
The dark came back empty.
I dialed his pack's main line on the motel wall phone, because my phone had eleven percent and I was rationing it like food. A packmate answered on the third ring. Male. Young. The careful tone of someone who'd been told to be careful.
"Ashford residence."
"My brother," I said. "Casey Ashford. He's my brother."
There was a silence I didn't like. Then: "He's in the medical wing, ma'am."
"What happened?"
"Rogue border skirmish. Two nights ago. He got himself between the raiders and the eastern field—" He stopped. "He's alive. He's not good."
I asked the questions I didn't want answers to. Was his wolf awake. Was he conscious. What the healer said. Each answer came a beat too slow, like he was reading off a card someone had left him.
Then he said, "The treatment's being held, ma'am. There's a procedural review from the coalition. Someone from Thornvale called it in."
I hung up before he could get through the rest.
I woke Liv, dressed her, and put her in the back seat with the duffel and one of Sylvia's notebooks I'd shoved in for her to draw in. The drive through the coastal farms took nearly an hour. The road was gray, the sky the color of a cold pot. I didn't turn on the radio. Liv asked once, in her small grave voice, if Uncle Casey would be okay, and I said yes the way you lie to a child — clean, quick, no flinch.
The pack medical wing smelled of iodine and old straw. He was in a narrow bed at the far end. Casey. Strap across his chest he wasn't fighting. Bandages stacked over his left side so thick they looked like plaster. Half his face bruised, one eye sealed shut. The other eye opened when I set Liv down and crossed to him.
"Clem." His voice was a scrape. His wolf was in there. I could feel her, a dim ember wrapped around the wreck of his ribs like a hand held over a flame.
I sat on the stool and put my hand over his.
The healer came. Young, tired, wearing the pinned crest of the regional coalition. She didn't bother with hope. "Without a coalition specialist, he loses the left arm. Maybe him, if the infection takes the shoulder." She said it like a weather report. "The pack-debt demand is—"
"Give me the number."
She gave it.
I won't write it here. You could work for a decade with your hands and your teeth and your back and never reach it. And I was a packless omega now. Evicted. Branded a fraud. Nobody hires a wolf with my reputation, and nobody loans to a wolf with no territory and no wolf.
"Who authorized the hold?" I asked.
She hesitated. Then, quietly: "Luna Bianca's office. On Thornvale authority."
I looked at Casey. His one eye was on me, and there was no fear in it. Just the flat, patient look of a boy who'd never been allowed to expect anything.
"I need the formal terms document," I said.
It arrived within the day. Ironridge letterhead. Stamped. A clerk's name in the corner.
TERMS OF RESOLUTION.
I read it in the waiting room with Liv asleep in my lap and my stomach dropping out of me line by line. I had to appear before the Ironridge pack tribunal. Publicly. And confess. That I had fabricated my Luna status. That I had knowingly deceived the pack, impersonated a Luna, and infiltrated Ironridge under false pretenses. That the mark on my neck was false, and I had known it was false — *known it* — the whole time.
The confession would be read into permanent pack record.
In exchange, the hold on Casey's treatment would be lifted.
I read it twice.
I understood what it was. This wasn't punishment. This was a legal muzzle. A transcript, in my own voice, calling myself a liar. So that when I stood up someday and told the truth about Massimo — the rogue Elder, the wolfsbane, the brand he put on me while I slept — there would already be a document. A permanent, stamped record that said: *This woman lies.*
I looked down at the paper.
Then I looked at Liv asleep against my chest, and I thought of Casey's one open eye, and I thought of the healer's flat voice saying *maybe him.*
My hand went up toward the scar on my neck.
I pulled it back.
