I waited until the house settled.
Gavin had dismissed Petra with a word and walked Rosie back to her room, his hand between her shoulder blades, his voice low and reassuring. I heard the murmur of it through the walls — that particular gentleness he used now, the one that had started to feel like a language I didn't speak.
I gave it twenty minutes. Then I went to the kitchen.
Petra was there. Of course she was. She had nowhere else to go, and Omegas learn early that the safest place after a reprimand is somewhere useful. She was scrubbing the stovetop with the focused energy of someone who needed her hands occupied, and she didn't hear me come in over the sound of the wind picking up outside.
I closed the door behind me.
She turned, and the expression on her face — that careful, practiced blankness — cracked just slightly before she could reassemble it. Her hands tightened on the cloth.
"Luna."
"Sit down, Petra," I said. I pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down myself first, so she'd understand I wasn't standing over her. "Please."
She sat. Slowly, like someone waiting for the other part of the sentence.
I folded my hands on the table and looked at her directly. "Tell me what you've seen."
The silence lasted about four seconds. I watched her measure it — the risk, the rank, the gap between what she knew and what she could afford to say. Her eyes moved to the door once.
"The door is closed," I said. "Take your time."
She told me.
All of it. The wolfsbane in the herbal tin, the careful measuring, the ceramic mug set out for my evening tea. The tampered latch in the east corridor. The stairwell light she'd replaced twice. Koda — she'd seen Rosie crouch beside him once, in the back hallway, her hand moving in a way that looked like petting but wasn't. She'd heard him whine. She hadn't understood it then. She understood it now.
Her hands were trembling by the time she finished. Not from fear of me. From the particular exhaustion of someone who has been carrying something alone for too long and has finally set it down.
I didn't interrupt. I didn't ask her to slow down or repeat herself. I just listened, and I watched her face, and I let every word land exactly where it needed to.
When she was done, the kitchen was very quiet. The wind had started in earnest outside, pressing against the windows with a low, persistent moan.
"You believe me," she said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Yes," I said.
She exhaled. Just once, short and sharp, like something releasing. Her eyes went bright for a moment before she blinked it back.
I leaned forward slightly. "Say nothing to anyone. Not yet. Not a word — not to the cook, not to Mara, not to anyone in this house." I held her gaze. "Can you do that?"
"Yes, Luna."
"Good." I stood, and I put my hand briefly on her shoulder — not a Luna's formal acknowledgment, just a hand on a shoulder, the way you touch someone when you want them to know they are not alone. "You did the right thing."
I left her there and walked back through the quiet house with my palm pressed flat to my stomach and my wolf completely, dangerously still.
---
That night, after Gavin fell asleep, I reached for my mother.
Mind-links between packs are possible but porous — any wolf with enough sensitivity can catch the edges of a transmission not meant for them. My mother had taught me the southern dialects when I was a girl, the tonal weights and rhythm shifts that Nighthollow wolves used when they needed privacy. I'd thought of it as a game then. A language between us.
I understood now why she'd taught me.
I shaped the link carefully, layering the southern cadence over the words the way she'd shown me, and I sent it south.
She answered within seconds. No surprise in it. No alarm. Just her presence, steady and immediate, the way it had always been — the particular quality of a woman who has sat in enough pack councils to know that when her daughter reaches through a guarded link in the middle of the night, you answer first and ask questions after.
I didn't explain everything. I didn't need to. I asked for a contact in Jenna's estranged birth pack in the south — someone with access to old records, old histories. Someone who would talk.
There was a pause. Brief.
Then: I'll have a name for you by morning.
No conditions. No questions I wasn't ready to answer. Just that — clean and immediate, the way my mother had always loved me. Through preparation. Through tools placed in my hands before I knew I'd need them.
I closed the link and lay in the dark beside my sleeping mate, my hand on my stomach, and I thought about the child down the hall and the eight years of silence that had brought her here, and I let myself feel the full weight of it for exactly as long as I could afford to.
Then I put it somewhere cold and quiet and went to sleep.
---
The storm hit two days later.
It came in fast from the north, the way the worst ones do — clear sky at noon and by nightfall a howling wall of white that buried the training yard and rattled every window in the pack house. The pack pulled inward. Patrols were called back. The fires were stoked high and the corridors filled with the close, warm smell of wolves sheltering together.
I had just started to feel it — that particular intimacy of a storm, the way it presses a mated pair together, the world outside going wild and the Alpha suite becoming its own small territory. Gavin had come to bed early for the first time in days. His hand found mine in the dark. My wolf, who had been growling for a week, went quiet — not trusting, but tired. Wanting, just for one night, to not be at war.
I was almost asleep when the screaming started.
It came from down the hall — high and ragged, the sound of a child in genuine terror, or something that wore that sound perfectly. It tore through the walls and hit every wolf in the house in the chest, because that is what a child's scream does, it bypasses reason entirely and goes straight to the instinct underneath.
Gavin was on his feet before I could speak.
"Gavin—"
But he was already moving, already out the door, his Alpha instincts fully engaged and pointed down the hall. I lay there for one second, two, listening to the screaming continue — rhythmic now, I noticed, with a pattern to it, the way a child screams when they want to be heard rather than when they are simply lost in terror — and then I heard Gavin's voice, low and soothing, and the screaming began to ease.
And then I heard his footsteps coming back.
Not alone.
The door opened. Gavin stood in the frame with Rosie against his side, her face pressed into his shirt, her small hands fisted in the fabric. She was shaking — convincingly, thoroughly, every inch of her performing the aftermath of terror.
"She can't be alone tonight," Gavin said. His voice was quiet, apologetic, but underneath it was the thing that had been underneath everything for days now — that pull, that blood-deep certainty that overrode everything else. "Just for tonight."
I looked at him. I looked at the child in his arms, and I felt my wolf rise up inside me with a fury so complete and so cold that it didn't even sound like a growl anymore. It sounded like a decision.
I said nothing.
I moved to the far side of the bed and lay down with my back to them both, my hand pressed flat and hard against my stomach, and I stared at the wall while the storm screamed outside and my mate settled his daughter — his daughter — into the sacred space of our mated bed.
My wolf didn't howl. She went silent in the way that means the time for howling is over.
Something had just ended. I didn't know yet exactly what. But I felt it close, like a door swinging shut in a room I had lived in for years, and the sound of it was very, very quiet.
