I started sleeping lighter.
I don't know exactly when it happened — somewhere between finding the wolfsbane in Koda's bowl and watching Gavin's hand settle on Rosie's shoulder for the fourth time in an hour. My wolf didn't sleep at all anymore. She lay curled just beneath my consciousness, ears up, tracking every sound the pack house made in the dark.
She heard Petra before I did.
It was past midnight, three nights after the banquet. I was lying still in the Alpha suite, one hand pressed flat to my stomach, when my wolf's attention sharpened like a pin catching light. Footsteps in the east corridor — Petra's, I'd learned to recognize the careful, minimal weight of them — and then a pause. Too long to be a bathroom trip. Too deliberate.
I didn't move. I just listened.
In the morning, I found Petra in the kitchen before the cook arrived. She was wiping down the counters with the focused efficiency of someone who needed something to do with her hands. When she heard me, she went very still.
"Petra," I said quietly. I poured myself a glass of water and leaned against the counter, keeping my voice casual, the way you do when you don't want someone to bolt. "You were in the east corridor last night."
She turned around slowly. Her eyes went to the doorway first — checking, I realized. Making sure no one else was there.
"Luna." Her voice was barely above a murmur. "The corridor latch. The one by the stairwell access."
I waited.
"It's been jammed," she said. "Not broken. Jammed. Something pressed into the mechanism, just enough so it sticks from the inside." She set down her cloth. "The stairwell light's been going out too. I replaced the bulb twice. It's not the bulb."
I looked at her. She held my gaze with the particular steadiness of someone who has made a decision and is past the point of reconsidering it.
"Which stairwell?" I asked.
"The east one," she said. "The one that connects the Luna's study to the lower floor."
The one I used alone most mornings, before Gavin's training sessions, before the rest of the house was moving. My wolf made a low, ugly sound somewhere inside me. Not surprise. Confirmation.
"Thank you," I said. I kept my face still and warm, the way a Luna's face stays still and warm when she is standing at the edge of something she can't yet see the bottom of. "Don't replace the light again. Leave it."
Petra nodded once and turned back to her counter, and I stood there for another moment with my water glass and my steady expression and something cold and very clear settling into place behind my ribs.
A jammed latch. A disabled light. A specific stairwell.
Not mischief. Architecture.
---
I found Koda that same afternoon.
He wasn't in his usual spot by the kitchen door. I checked the hall, the east corridor, the back porch where he liked to sit in the thin winter sun. Then I heard it — a sound so small I almost missed it. A low, trembling whine from behind the mudroom door.
I pushed it open.
Koda was pressed into the far corner, as far from the door as the small room allowed. His whole body was shaking, his tail pulled tight against his belly, his eyes on me when I came in but without the usual surge of relief. He just trembled, like an animal that had learned that nothing good came from the sound of a door opening.
I went to him. I sat down on the cold mudroom floor without thinking about my dress, and I put my hand on his flank and felt the shaking move through my palm.
"Hey," I murmured. "Hey, I'm here."
He pressed his nose against my knee and didn't stop trembling.
I sat with him for a long time. My wolf was completely silent. Not the growling quiet of earlier in the week — something different. The quiet of a she-wolf who has stopped asking questions and started keeping count.
Koda's food bowl was full beside him. Untouched. I checked it the way I'd learned to check everything now, lifting it close and breathing in slow and deliberate. No wolfsbane this time. He just wasn't eating.
Animals can't be gaslit. That was the thought that came to me, sitting on that floor with my hand on his shaking back. You could tell an Omega she was confused. You could tell a Luna she was overreacting, that patrol wolves tracked wolfsbane on their boots, that old dogs got set in their ways. You couldn't tell a wolf-dog that the thing his body remembered hadn't happened.
I stayed until the shaking eased a little. Then I filled his bowl with fresh food, moved it within reach, and I sat beside him while he ate — slow and careful, like he was tasting each bite for something he expected to find.
---
I was in the study when I heard Gavin's voice drop into his Alpha register.
Not raised. He never raised it when he was truly commanding. It just went flat and heavy, the way iron sounds when it's dropped on stone, and the walls of the pack house seemed to settle around it. I came to the doorway of the main hall and stopped.
Petra was standing in the center of the room. Her hands were at her sides, perfectly still, her face arranged in the careful blankness that Omegas wear when they are being addressed by an Alpha and cannot afford to show what they are actually feeling.
Rosie was beside Gavin. She wasn't crying — she was past crying, or performing past crying, her eyes red-rimmed and her lower lip doing the small, contained tremble of a child who has cried a great deal and is trying very hard to be brave about it. She was holding Gavin's sleeve with two fingers, barely touching, the grip of a child who was trying not to cling.
"She didn't bring dinner," Rosie said softly. "And when I woke up last night, I called for someone, and nobody came."
Gavin looked at Petra. "Is this true?"
Petra's jaw tightened, just barely. "No, Alpha. I brought dinner at the regular hour. I checked on her at—"
"She left it outside the door," Rosie said, her voice still soft, still careful. Not accusatory. Sad. "I couldn't reach it."
It was so precise. That small detail — the door, the height, the helplessness of a child who couldn't reach — it was the kind of detail that sounds true because it's specific, and it lands in the chest before the mind can examine it.
Gavin's voice went flatter. "I expect better from pack house staff, regardless of rank. Particularly with a child in the house."
Petra said, "Yes, Alpha," and I watched her throat move as she swallowed whatever else was in there.
I didn't move from the doorway. I watched Petra's hands, still at her sides, and her eyes, which were not looking at Gavin. They were looking at Rosie. And in them — underneath the carefully arranged blankness — was the particular expression of someone who is memorizing a face.
Not with hatred. With the focused, patient attention of someone who has decided that memory is the only weapon available to her right now, and she is going to make it a very precise one.
Rosie glanced over at that moment. Just a flicker — her eyes moving from Gavin to Petra and then, quickly, to me in the doorway. The sad, brave expression didn't change. But for one half-second, before she looked back at Gavin, I saw something else move through her face. Something that had nothing to do with sadness.
Assessment. Quick and flat and very, very old for her age.
I pressed my palm to my stomach.
My wolf didn't growl. She went still — the absolute, gathered stillness of a she-wolf who has just understood what she is dealing with, and is deciding what to do next.
