When His Luna Tried Poisoning Our Daughter

The bond scar went cold at 4:47 on a Wednesday morning, the way it always does when an Ironveil wolf crosses into a hundred-mile radius. I was on my knees in the Duskhollow banquet hall, scrub brush in my hand, soap water soaking through the knees of my uniform. The cold spread up my throat like a finger pressed to glass. I exhaled once, slow, and kept scrubbing.

Eight years. I knew the feeling now the way other women knew the weight of a wedding ring.

I had given Lily her wolfsbane tincture an hour ago. Three drops under the tongue, the green bitterness that made her flinch even in her sleep. Her breathing had been shallow, then steadied. I had counted the breaths to twenty before I let myself leave.

Now I worked the floor in long even strokes, east wall to center, mapping the hall the way I mapped every room I entered. Two service exits. A staff door behind the dais. The high windows opened inward — useless. The Duskhollow Alpha would sit at the head table; the Ironveil delegation would be seated to his right, against pack custom, because Angel Dunn no longer attended summits as a guest. He attended them as weather.

My hands did not shake. They had not shaken in years.

*

The doors opened at half past nine.

I did not need to look up. The aura entered the room before he did — a pressure that pushed the air out of the hall and made the wolves at the welcome line bare their necks without thinking. Two betas dropped their gaze. A young Delta near the wine service made a small sound in his throat, almost a whine. The Duskhollow Alpha straightened his shoulders and stepped forward to greet the man who had eaten three packs in eight years and called it diplomacy.

I knelt at the center of the hall with my rag in my hand and my hair fallen forward across my face. I did not move. Movement is what predators see first.

The jasmine on my skin reached him before I knew it had.

I heard him stop. A single beat of stilled breath in a room where every wolf was breathing in unison around his aura. Then the small wet sound of a man steadying himself against another man's grip — his Beta, I thought distantly, catching his elbow.

My scar burned cold. The dead bond inside my chest gave one slow pull, like something testing a chain.

I did not look up.

I dipped the rag, wrung it, and laid it flat against the next square of floor. Footsteps moved past. Voices began the slow choreography of pack greeting. I heard him answer. His voice had not changed. That was the thing I had not prepared for, and I let myself feel it for one second only, the way you might press a thumb to a bruise to confirm it is still there.

Then I went back to work.

*

He found me in the service corridor between the kitchens and the wine cellar at half past three, after the first session let out.

The corridor is narrow. I had chosen it because it is narrow. He stepped into the mouth of it and his aura filled it like water filling a pipe — pressed against the walls, against my lungs, against the back of my teeth. An Omega should have folded. Any wolf in this house would have folded.

I set my bucket down. I straightened. I looked at him.

He was bigger than I remembered. Not in body — in occupation, in the way a man takes up the space around him. His eyes were the same gray. His mouth had learned a harder line. He was looking at me the way a man looks at something he has been told is impossible.

"Everly."

My name in his mouth. I had prepared for this. I had prepared for it for three years. I felt nothing useful and a great deal that was not.

"Alpha Dunn." My voice was even. "If you'd like to book my time, the Duskhollow Alpha sets the rates. I'm scheduled through the kitchens until ten. Anything outside scheduled hours goes through the proper channel."

His lips parted. Closed.

"Was there something you needed?" I asked.

He did not answer. I watched the thing inside him try to find a sentence and fail. Eight years of territorial authority, three absorbed packs, an aura that had just made a Delta whine in a banquet hall — and in this corridor, with a rag in my apron pocket, I had closed a door in his face.

I picked up the bucket. I walked past him. He did not stop me. His shoulder brushed mine and the dead bond gave another pull and I did not break stride.

Behind me, somewhere deep in him, his wolf began to howl. I could feel it through the cold place at my throat. It did not stop.

*

Lily was awake when I came in that night.

She held up the new drawing without speaking. The silver wolf — her wolf, the one she had been drawing since she could hold a crayon — stood in an open field this time. Alone. Looking toward something past the edge of the page.

I held it longer than I should have.

"It's good, baby."

"Mama, who is she looking at?"

"I don't know yet." I kissed her hair. "Sleep."

I gave her the second tincture. She flinched. She always flinched. I waited until her breathing evened, then I lifted the floorboard and laid the drawing in the waterproof envelope with the others.

Catalina was sitting in the dark in the kitchen chair, the way she had been sitting for eight years.

"He's here," I said. "The stage is almost ready."

"Good." She did not look up from her hands. "Don't rush it."

Down the corridor, two floors below, in a guest suite I had never seen, an Alpha was pacing a rug into threads and his wolf was howling into a wall.

I turned off the lamp.