I did not see the war council. I heard about it later, in the way one hears about weather in a country one used to live in.
But I could picture it. I had been in that room. The long table Kenneth's father had commissioned before he died. The map of Hollowridge pinned to the wall with the eastern trade routes still drawn in red as though red ink could make them real. Kenneth at the head of the table with his palms flat on the wood, the way he always sat when he had already decided and was performing the appearance of listening.
The Beta would have spoken carefully. That was his job. He would have said the word *tribute* the way you say the word *tumor*—quietly, once, and then not again unless someone asked you to repeat it. He would have said: *A quarter of the territory, Alpha. Non-refundable. Even if we lose.*
And Kenneth would have used the Alpha tone. Not because the Beta needed to be commanded. Because Kenneth needed to hear himself do it.
*Draft the petition. List the pups as pack property. Conceived during a bonded mating. I will deliver it personally with my Luna.*
My Luna.
I heard those two words in my head in his voice and my hand went, without my permission, to the cold scar at my throat.
Declan noticed. He always noticed. He was standing at the window of the healing wing with his back to me, and he did not turn, but his shoulders shifted the smallest degree.
"Rowan will meet them at the gate," he said.
"You won't."
"No."
I understood. A prince does not walk out to a minor-pack Alpha in his own driveway. That was the entire point.
---
I learned the rest from Rowan himself, later that afternoon, because Declan sent him in to give me the account personally. I think Declan understood, without asking, that I needed to hear it out loud from someone who had been in the room. I think he understood I had spent six years being told stories about myself by a man who lied for a living, and I would never again accept a secondhand version of a scene that concerned me.
Rowan stood at the foot of my bed in the same formal dress he had worn to the gate. He did not sit. He was not that kind of Beta.
"They arrived at ten-fourteen," he said. "Her first. She stepped out of the car before he did."
"Of course she did."
"She had chosen a coat that opened in the front." Rowan's voice did not change. "To display the pregnancy."
I closed my eyes for a second. Not from pain. From something closer to recognition. I had watched Jasmine pick outfits since we were sixteen. I knew exactly how long she had stood in front of that mirror.
"And Kenneth?"
"He walked to the gate expecting His Highness. I greeted him instead."
"How."
"Politely."
I opened my eyes. Rowan's face had not moved, but there was something at the corner of his mouth that was not a smile and was not the absence of one.
"I informed him that under Lycan statute forty-two, subsection nine, a custody petition for pups born within the jurisdiction of a Lycan-claimed mate requires a formal tribunal filing accompanied by a non-refundable territory tribute equivalent to twenty-five percent of the petitioning pack's held land. I recited the figure in acres. I offered to provide him the written citations for his legal team."
"You said all of that with your face like that."
"Yes, Your Highness."
The title landed in the room before either of us acknowledged it. He did not take it back. I did not correct him. Something in my chest did a small, terrible thing that I would examine later.
"He flinched," Rowan said. "His aura did. The pack members behind the gate saw it. He turned his body sideways. His hands were on the car door when he got back in and they were not steady."
"And Jasmine."
"She watched him flinch." Rowan paused, and this was the only place his composure allowed itself a texture. "She saw it before he did. That was the moment worth watching."
---
I did not sleep well that night. Not because of Kenneth. Because of what I understood was coming.
A man like Kenneth does not lose in a driveway and go home to sit down. A man like Kenneth loses in a driveway and begins to imagine something louder.
I knew him. Six years of knowing him. He was standing in the Hollowridge training yard right now, I was almost certain of it. He was talking to Gareth. He was drawing lines on a map that would not include a territory tribute because he had decided the map itself was going to move.
He was going to come for the twins.
And he was not going to tell Jasmine, because in the shape of the plan forming in his head there was no room for a pregnant woman who had already served her purpose.
I turned my head on the pillow and looked at the crib. Two small breathing shapes.
My wolf shifted in the dark inside me. Still small. Still wounded. But closer to the surface than she had been yesterday.
*Soon,* something in me said. Not to Declan. Not to Kenneth.
To her.
