Wilder didn't say the word.

I watched him not say it—watched the shape of it sit behind his teeth for one long second before he swallowed it back down. Whatever he'd smelled when I crossed the border, whatever had made his jaw go tight in the dark, he folded it away like a man putting something fragile back in a drawer.

"This way," he said instead, and turned toward the compound.

He walked a half-step ahead of me the whole way, close enough to matter, far enough not to crowd. The guest suite he showed me to had a bed made with hospital corners and a window facing the mountains, and he stood in the doorway just long enough to say, "Rhea will look after you tonight," before he was gone, like he understood that the kindest thing he could give me was an empty room and no questions.

Rhea Solace had soft hands and a softer voice. She didn't ask what happened to my arm. She just took it in both of hers, tilted it toward the lamp, and went very quiet.

"Frostbite," she said finally. "Deep-set."

"I know."

She worked in silence after that, smoothing a warm salve—wolfsbane-antidote, she told me, though I wasn't sure what that meant for a wound that had nothing to do with poison—into the pale, spiraling marks that climbed from my wrist to my elbow. The salve was warm. My skin didn't seem to believe it.

"These won't fade," Rhea said, gentle, like she was breaking news to someone else's body. "The cold set too deep. They're—" She paused, searching for a kinder word than *permanent*, and didn't find one.

I looked down at my own arm like it belonged to a stranger. Six marks. Seven. I counted them the way I used to count breaths on the bad nights, the way I'd once counted rings of a phone that never got answered. Ice-blue, mapped across my skin like a small, useless constellation. A record no one but me would ever read correctly.

"Okay," I said, and Rhea's eyes flicked up to my face, surprised, maybe, that I hadn't cried.

I didn't have anything left to cry with. Not that night.

---

The puzzle appeared on the library table the next evening, like it had always been there. A thousand pieces. Blue hydrangeas on white, the box lid propped against a lamp.

Wilder took the chair across from me without asking permission, the way he seemed to do most things—present, but never presuming.

"You traveled a lot, as Luna," he said, turning a piece over in his fingers. Not a question. An opening.

"Border diplomacy. Mostly small towns. The kind with one diner and everyone's cousin working the counter."

"Favorite?"

"There was a place in the eastern hills that made a ginger tea I still think about." I fit a piece into the frame's corner. "I never got the name of it."

"I'll find it," he said, so simply that I almost laughed.

He didn't mention the bond. He didn't touch me, didn't lean too close, didn't do any of the small territorial things I'd learned to brace for without knowing I was bracing. He just asked about tea, about diners, about nothing that mattered and everything that did, and somewhere in the second hour of the fourth night, I realized I had stopped counting the tiles.

On the fifth night, I slept until morning. All the way through. No numbers, no static hum of unanswered calls behind my eyes. Just dark, and then light.

---

At Nighthollow, Ledger told his Beta she'd be back within the week.

"She's making a point," he said, pacing the length of his office, the floor already worn from three days of this same track. "She wants to be chased. Fine. I'll give her a week."

Caden Holt said nothing. He had learned, over the years, exactly when Ledger's certainty was armor and when it was truth, and this was armor stretched so thin you could see the shape of the fear underneath it.

On the fourth night, Ledger passed the Luna suite and stopped without meaning to.

The door was cracked. Mallory's rose-water bottles sat lined up on Emberly's vanity, catching the lamplight, and the room smelled wrong—sweet where it used to be warm, sharp where it used to be soft. He stood in the doorway a long moment, trying to remember what the right smell had been.

He couldn't.

Something turned over low in his chest, a wolf pressing uneasily against the inside of his ribs, and he shut it down before it could become a thought with words attached to it. He closed the door and walked away.

The next afternoon, with Ledger out on border patrol, Caden let himself into the same suite, against every standing order, and pried the vanity panel loose because a loose board had been bothering him for weeks. Behind it: a journal, spine soft from handling. Beneath a floorboard he checked on instinct: a small silver recorder.

He sat on the floor and pressed play.

He made it sixty seconds before he stopped the recording, stood, and went to find Ledger without a single word to anyone in between.

The call came through on the eighth night, on a phone Antonio had given me before he drove away—a line only three people had the number to. I almost didn't answer it. I was elbow-deep in blue hydrangea pieces, half a border assembled on the library table, and Wilder was across from me turning a piece over and over between his fingers like he already knew where it went but wanted an excuse to sit there a little longer.

The screen said CADEN HOLT.

I stepped into the hallway before I picked up. Wilder didn't follow. He never did.

"Emberly." Caden's voice was rougher than I remembered it. "I need you to know something happened. I'm not calling to hurt you. I'm calling because you should hear it from me before it turns into pack gossip that gets it wrong."

"Okay," I said. That word again. It seemed to be all I had left for bad news.

He told it plainly, the way Betas are trained to report things—facts first, feeling stripped out, though I could hear the feeling trying to leak through anyway. He'd found the recorder under the floorboard. He'd brought it to Ledger's office and set it on the desk without a word, because there were no words that fit, and he'd left before Ledger pressed play.

"He locked the door," Caden said. "I stayed outside. I could still hear it. The walls in that place aren't as thick as everyone thinks."

I knew what was on that recording. I'd made it. I remembered the tile floor under my knees, cold enough to burn, and the sound my own voice made when I stopped trying to sound calm.

"He listened to all of it," Caden said. "Ninety-nine counts. I know because I was counting too, standing out there, waiting for him to turn it off. He didn't. Not once."

I pictured it without meaning to—Ledger alone at his desk, my voice crawling out of a small silver speaker. *Call eighty-seven. Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine.* I tried to feel something at the image of him hearing it. I reached for the place where anger should have lived, or grim satisfaction, or anything with a name.

There was only the shape of an outline. Nothing inside it.

"He checked his own call log after," Caden went on. "Forty-seven minutes at the auction. Then a receipt. Two hours, itemized. A diamond collar." A pause, like even he needed a second before saying the next part. "He went into the Luna suite after that and put his fists through the mirror. The vanity. The walls. I had to physically drag him out before he broke his own hands past healing. His wolf howled the whole time, Emberly. I've heard him angry a hundred times. This wasn't anger."

"What was it," I said. Not really a question.

"Grief," Caden said quietly. "Like something finally understood what it lost."

I leaned my head against the hallway wall and looked at the mountains through the window at the end of it, dark shapes against a darker sky, and waited to feel the old ache. It didn't come. I only felt tired, the way you feel tired reading about a stranger's accident in the news—sorry, distantly, for a life that wasn't touching yours anymore.

"There's more," Caden said. "That same night, the pack started smelling something in the halls. Honey. Lavender." His voice thinned. "Your scent, Emberly. Except you're two hundred miles away and your rooms are wrecked. He won't let the Omegas near the suite. He set you a plate at breakfast this morning. I set mine across from his and didn't say anything, because what do you say to that."

I didn't answer. There was nothing in me that reached for that image either—not tenderness, not vindication. Just distance, the kind you feel looking through a window at a room you used to live in.

"He called Mallory in and played her the recording," Caden said. "She cried on cue. Said you might have staged it. Said a grieving woman is capable of a lot." A short, humorless breath. "He didn't touch her shoulder this time. First time in fifteen years I've seen him not reach for her when she cries. Something in the way she was doing it—starting, stopping, like a faucet—I think it finally registered with him."

"And now?"

"Now she's told the whole pack she's carrying his pup," Caden said. "Blackout mating, the night of the Solstice. This morning, in front of everyone." A beat. "He didn't even blink, Emberly. He just told Seraphine to run a blood-scent verification before sundown. In front of witnesses."

I looked down the hall toward the library, where lamplight spilled soft and yellow across the floor, where a thousand pieces of sky-blue hydrangea waited half-finished on a table, where a man who had never once raised his voice at me was sitting very still, giving me exactly as much space as I needed and not one inch more.

"Thank you for telling me," I said, and I meant it, in the flat, careful way I meant most things now.

Then I hung up, and went back to the puzzle.

Caden called again two nights later, while I was pressing the last corner piece of blue sky into place and Wilder was watching me do it instead of the puzzle.

I took the phone into the hallway again. It was becoming a habit, this leaving of warm rooms to stand in cold ones and listen to Nighthollow unravel from two hundred miles away. I pressed my back to the wall and looked at the dark window at the end of the hall, the same mountains, the same stars, and waited.

"Seraphine did the verification this morning," Caden said. No greeting. He'd stopped doing that after the first call. "Full pack witness. Me, the Gamma, six seniors. Mallory stood in the center of the room like she was posing for something."

"And?"

"No conception scent. No gestational markers." A pause, like he was making sure I heard the shape of it. "There's no pup, Emberly. There never was."

I didn't feel triumph. I catalogued the fact the way I catalogued everything now—filed it, dated it, moved on. "Did she cry?"

"She screamed. Called Seraphine incompetent. Called the whole room blind." His voice went flatter. "Ledger didn't say a word. He just watched her the way you watch something you're trying to identify from a distance."

I closed my eyes and pictured it anyway, even though I told myself I wouldn't. The old kitchen. The old faces. A room I used to know the temperature of.

"There's more," Caden said, and something in his tone made me open my eyes again. "While the testing materials were still on the table, Seraphine went to her cabinet. Pulled a sealed file. Set it in front of Ledger without saying anything."

I knew, before he said it, what file that was.

"She kept it," I said. "I asked her not to report it."

"She kept it anyway. Flagged 'unexplained wolfsbane exposure.' Dated the week of the miscarriage." Caden exhaled, long and slow, like the words cost him something to carry. "Ledger read it standing up. I watched his hands. He didn't move for almost a full minute."

I pressed my fingers to the cold place on my neck, an old habit that hadn't caught up yet to the fact that there was nothing left there to press against.

"He asked me to pull the kitchen archive," Caden went on. "Security footage, the week the file was dated. I found it. Timestamped. Intact."

I already knew what it would show. I had known, somewhere underneath the parts of me that still functioned, for months. I had just never let myself look directly at it, the way you don't look directly at the sun even when you already know it's there.

"9:14 p.m.," Caden said. "Mallory. Alone in the Luna kitchen. She's got a little cloth pouch, and she opens it, and she crushes something dried between two spoons. Wolfsbane. You can see the color of it in the footage—that gray-green." His voice was careful now, deliberately even, the way you speak when you're trying not to let your own hands shake through your voice. "She stirs it into the teapot. Your teapot, Emberly. The one you used every night."

I thought about the tea. Ginger and something floral underneath, the way it had tasted slightly bitter that month and I'd blamed a bad batch of leaves.

"Her face," Caden said. "That's the part I can't— She's not rushed. She's not scared of getting caught. She's just stirring. Like she's making tea for herself. Ninety-four seconds of footage and her expression doesn't change once."

I didn't say anything. There was nothing in me reaching for the place where rage should have been. Just a long, quiet stretch of nothing, like standing at the edge of a lake and looking down into water too dark to see the bottom of.

"He played it for Ledger in full," Caden said. "Twice. I stood there both times. Neither of us said a word when it ended."

The hallway was very quiet. I could hear Wilder in the library, the soft scrape of a puzzle piece against the table, patient, waiting for me the way he always did.

"Emberly." Caden's voice dropped, tight and low, like he was already moving. "He just stood up. He told the Gamma to bring her in front of the whole pack. Tonight. He's already walking. I have to go."

The line went dead before I could ask him anything else, the silence on the other end swallowing whatever was about to happen two hundred miles away, without me, in a room I used to call mine.