The infirmary smelled like antiseptic and dried sage, and Sienna sat on the edge of the exam table while Dr. Marisol Adeyemi peeled back the bandage at her collarbone with careful fingers. The wound had wept through the gauze overnight, silver threading pink at the edges. It stung when the air hit it. Sienna didn't flinch.
"This is going to need re-dressing every few hours for a while," Marisol said, not quite meeting her eyes. Her hands were steady, but her voice wasn't. "The tissue's not healing the way a normal severed mark would."
"Nothing about me heals the way it should." Sienna kept her tone even. "Say what you called me in here to say, Marisol."
The healer set down her cotton swab. Picked it back up. Set it down again. "You're pregnant."
The words landed strangely, like a stone dropped into still water that refused to ripple. Sienna sat with them a moment, feeling nothing move in her chest except a low hum from Sovereign, alert now, listening.
"That isn't possible," she said, not as denial, but as a diagnosis of her own. "My bloodline's been scarred for years. You told me yourself, three winters ago, that conception wasn't likely without intervention."
"I know what I told you." Marisol's hands finally went still. "I ran the bloodwork twice. I don't have an explanation for it. I just have the results."
Sienna's hand drifted, without her permission, to rest flat against her stomach. She let it stay there for exactly three breaths before she folded her composure back into place like a sheet pulled taut over a bed.
"How far along."
"Six weeks. Give or take a few days."
"Is the pup healthy."
"As far as I can tell. Strong heartbeat for the stage. No signs of distress." Marisol hesitated. "Given everything—the rejection, the mark splitting—I'd have expected complications. There are none."
"Is this in any official pack record yet."
"No. I came to you first."
"Then file it now." Sienna's voice didn't rise, but it sharpened, each word placed like a stone in a wall. "Official channels. Council-standard timestamp. I want a copy sent directly to my quarters the moment it's logged."
Marisol blinked. "Sienna—"
"Before Pierce hears about it from anyone who might decide to sit on the paperwork for him." She stood, testing her balance, finding it steady enough. "Do it within the hour, Marisol. Please."
The healer nodded slowly, understanding dawning behind her eyes. "I'll go now."
Sienna left the infirmary with the bandage still damp against her collarbone and her face arranged into something unreadable. She did not smile. She did not cry. Somewhere beneath her sternum, Sovereign was pacing, restless and sharp-toothed with the kind of vigilance that came before a storm.
*He'll come running,* Sovereign said. *Watch how fast.*
He came within two hours.
Pierce arrived at her door with a tray of food he hadn't cooked himself and an expression scrubbed clean of the fury she'd seen on the dais. "Sienna." His voice had dropped into something careful, almost tender, a register she hadn't heard from him in over a year. "Can we talk?"
She let him in. Let him set the tray down. Let him say the word *premature*—that the rejection had been *premature*, that he'd acted in *haste*, that they needed to discuss *what was best for the pup*—and she felt her jaw tighten by one fraction of an inch and nothing more. Underneath the cedar and iron she'd loved for eight years, Lylah's floral musk still clung to him, faint but present, like a stain that hadn't quite washed out.
"Have dinner with me tonight," he said. "Just us. Let's figure this out properly."
"All right," she said, and gave him nothing else.
The chambers that night were candlelit, her favorite meal laid out untouched between them, Pierce's voice pitched low and warm in a way that once would have unspooled something soft in her chest. Now it only made Sovereign growl low and constant, a current running under Sienna's skin.
He reached across the table midway through his second apology and closed his hand around her wrist. His canines had already begun to lengthen. "Let me make this right," he said, and his eyes dropped to her neck—not with tenderness, she realized, but with calculation, the same look he gave a ledger that needed balancing.
She pulled her arm free in one clean motion.
His face didn't crumple with hurt. It hardened, jaw setting, as if she'd broken some agreement he'd assumed was already signed.
"If you attempt to re-mark me," Sienna said, standing, her voice so level it might have been boredom, "I will file a forced-remarking complaint with the Lycan Council under royal statute. Tonight, if you try it again."
She left the meal untouched and the candles still burning, and did not look back to see Pierce sitting alone at the table he'd set for two.
