The healer's quarters were quiet by the time Sienna sat down with her cedar box, the same box she'd carried from her mother's kitchen at eighteen, corners worn smooth from eight years of morning hands. She measured the chamomile first, then the valerian root, then the pale curl of dried ginger she added for the pup, though she hadn't told anyone yet why her blends had shifted these past six weeks. The ritual steadied her. It always had. Even now, with her collarbone still tender under gauze and her name already halfway erased from the pack ledgers, her hands knew this work without needing her mind's permission.
She was grinding the last of the mixture when the hum started.
It lived at the base of her skull most days, a low static she'd stopped noticing years ago, the way you stop hearing a clock once it's ticked long enough. Tonight it sharpened. It rose out of the background and pressed forward, and for one impossible second it sounded almost like syllables—shapeless, urgent, clawing at the inside of her skull like something trying to get out through ice.
Sienna's fingers went still on the pestle.
The sound vanished as fast as it came. She sat there in the low lamplight, breathing carefully, waiting for it to return. It didn't. But her hands were shaking when she looked down at them, and she had to set the pestle down before she dropped it.
She looked at the finished blend in its little bowl—the same nightly tea she'd made without fail for over a year, ever since Lylah had taken over the apothecary stores and started mixing this particular batch herself, insisting it would help with Sienna's chronic fatigue. Sienna had never questioned it. She questioned it now.
She pushed the bowl to the far edge of the table, untouched.
*For the pup,* she told herself. *Just to be careful.* It was true, as far as it went. It was also the first night in fourteen months her body would go without whatever was in that cup.
The training ground the next afternoon was full of noise—the crack of practice blades, the low grunts of Delta warriors running drills, Pierce's voice cutting across the yard in that clipped Alpha register he used when he wanted an audience to notice him working. Sienna was walking the perimeter path when Lylah appeared at his elbow, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm, and called out across the yard in a voice pitched for maximum carry.
"Sienna! How are you feeling, sweetheart?" Lylah's smile was bright and utterly false, performed for the dozen warriors who'd paused their sparring to watch. "Do you need anything from the apothecary? I know it's *my* stores now, but I'd hate for you to go without."
Someone near the sparring ring laughed—short, ugly, quickly swallowed.
Pierce said nothing. He didn't even look up from the drill roster in his hands.
Sienna stopped walking. She turned, found Lylah's eyes across the yard, and let a full three seconds of silence stretch before she spoke, her voice carrying clean and level over the quiet that had settled across the training ground.
"I'd like a full inventory audit of the restricted apothecary stores conducted before the Council tribunal." She let that sit a moment. "I'll expect Beta Sallow to facilitate it personally."
The laughter died. Lylah's smile didn't drop so much as freeze in place, a crack showing at the corner of her mouth. Sienna held her gaze one beat longer, then resumed walking, unhurried, her boots even on the gravel.
She woke at three in the morning to a voice that wasn't hers.
It didn't announce itself gently. It surged up through her chest like something breaking the surface of deep water, low and furious and ancient, and it filled her skull with a single word.
*Sovereign.*
Sienna sat bolt upright in the dark, both hands flying to press against her temples, heart slamming.
*I've been here the whole time,* the voice said, ragged, as if speaking cost it something. *Eight years. I watched everything he did to you. I watched her poison you.*
"Poison—" Sienna's voice came out cracked. "What are you talking about. What was in the tea."
The answer came back sharp and merciless, one word, no softening.
*Wolfsbane.*
Sienna didn't move for a long moment. The word sat in her chest like a stone dropped into still water, and this time the ripples came—cold, spreading, undeniable. She was not wolfless. She had never been wolfless.
She had been caged.
She didn't sleep again. By the time grey light crept under her door, she was already at her desk, cedar box pushed aside, two years of apothecary requisition logs spread flat under the lamp, Lylah's access records laid beside them line by line—hunting now for every place the numbers had been made to lie.
