Carla came for me on the third day.
I was still in the Omega wing, sitting on a cot too thin to call a mattress, when she appeared in the doorway with two Delta guards behind her. She wore her elder's robes, the ones with her old rank pin still fastened at the collar, and her face was arranged into something that might have looked like grief to anyone who didn't know her.
"You're unstable," she said. "Rejection-shock. It happens sometimes, when a bond breaks this violently. The pack can't have you wandering loose in this state."
"I'm not unstable." My voice came out flat. Quiet. I'd learned a long time ago that quiet was safer than loud.
"You screamed on the altar, Violette. You collapsed. Your wolf is destabilized and unpredictable." She said it the way she said everything—like she was reading from a report, like the words had already been approved by someone above her. "This is for your protection. And the pack's."
I didn't argue. There was no point. The Delta guards were already moving toward me, and I understood, the way I'd understood most things in my life, that resistance would only be used as further proof of the story she was telling.
They took me north, past the training grounds, past the last row of pack cabins, into the woods where the trees grew close enough to block out the moon. The den was underground—a chamber dug into the hillside with a wooden frame reinforced along the walls, and the moment they opened the door, the smell hit me. Wolfsbane. Not the faint bitterness I'd tasted in my tea for years without understanding what it was. This was thick. Oily. It coated the inside of my throat before I'd even stepped inside.
"Elder's orders," one of the Omega guards muttered, not quite looking at me. He was young. I recognized him—I'd healed his split knuckles two winters ago after a training accident.
"Tyler," I said. He flinched at his own name. "You don't have to do this."
"Elder's orders," he said again, and shut the door.
The first hour, my lungs burned. By the second, my skin had started to itch—a low, crawling agony just under the surface, like something trying to claw its way out and finding no purchase. Somewhere in the hollow space where the bond used to be, the ember of my wolf—already so faint I'd spent sixteen years wondering if she was real at all—dimmed further. I felt her the way you feel a candle flame in a house with the windows open. Flickering. Fighting for air she didn't have.
I sat with my back against the wall and made myself breathe slow.
Then I started cataloging.
It was the only thing I knew how to do with fear—turn it into information. I noted the guard rotation: two Omegas, shift change every six hours, the changeover always a little sloppy in the last ten minutes before the next pair arrived. I noted the wolfsbane delivery—a covered bucket, brought once a day, poured along a channel cut into the floor near the door. I noted the wood. In the far corner, where the oil treatment had soaked deepest, the frame had started to rot. Soft. Give-able, if I had the strength and the time.
I noted the date.
Eighteen days until the Challenge Rite. Lycan delegates confirmed to attend—I'd heard the guards talking about extra patrols for the visiting party.
I didn't write any of it down. There was nothing to write with, and even if there had been, I wasn't foolish enough to leave evidence in a place someone would search. I held it all in my chest, next to the hollow ache, and let it become something else. Something with edges.
Sydney came on the fifth day.
She arrived with a healer's satchel she clearly didn't know how to use, and performed five minutes of soft, concerned questions for the guards' benefit—"Is she eating? Is she drinking water? The Alpha wants her comfortable"—her voice pitched exactly the way I'd heard Luna's speak at pup naming ceremonies. Warm. Gracious. Utterly false.
Then the guards rotated, and I watched through the slit in the door as she caught the new pair before they'd even settled in, murmuring something too low for me to hear. I saw a small velvet pouch change hands. I saw one of the guards glance toward the den, then look away fast, the way people look away from something they've already decided to let happen.
That night, the bucket came twice.
The air went from bitter to metallic, a heaviness that pressed down on my chest like a hand. I pressed my palm flat against the rotted corner of the wood, trying to hold onto something solid, and felt the ember of my wolf shudder—once, violently—like a candle caught in a wind with nowhere left to hide.