The phone Chase had buried beneath the wolf-bone case was smaller than my palm. I waited until the infirmary was empty, until the night Healer had gone to check the north ward, and then I sat on the floor beside Theo's old bed and pressed the number Chase had left.

Johnathan Hoffman answered on the second ring.

"Miss Chapman."

His voice was steady. Older than I'd expected. Not warm, exactly, but he did not waste a syllable on formality, and I recognized the shape of it from Theo's descriptions.

"You've been waiting," I said.

"Since the night your brother stopped answering. Tell me what you have."

I told him. Clipped sentences, in order. The coerced announcement on the courtyard stones. My mother framed and exiled. The wolfsbane in my food for months. The ledgers Chase had smuggled in a crate of dried herbs.

Hoffman did not interrupt.

When I finished, he was quiet for three seconds. Then he said, "The ledgers prove Rose Larson's treason. They do not, on their own, prove Miller Vargas ordered violence against a ranked wolf. He will claim she acted independently. He will say he trusted her and was deceived."

"He was in the doorway when Theo went over the railing."

"Then I need proof of that. A witness the Council cannot dismiss, or footage. Without it, he keeps his aura and his pack."

I pressed my thumb against the mark on my neck.

"I'll get it."

"Miss Chapman." A small pause. "Move carefully. My channel is open. When you transmit, use the sequence I'm about to send you and do not deviate from it. The Council's enforcement arm will receive within minutes."

"Understood."

"Your brother spoke of you often."

I closed my eyes.

"Save it for when he wakes up," I said, and ended the call.

---

Miller announced the Winter Solstice Banquet the next morning at breakfast.

He did not ask me. He set his coffee down, glanced at me across the table, and said, "You'll accompany me to the Solstice event. Four visiting packs. Full ceremonial dress. We present as we are meant to present."

His voice carried the automatic weight of the Alpha tone without dropping into a bond command. It did not need to. Theo was breathing shallow on the Healer's table two floors below us. My mother was somewhere beyond the territory lines with winter coming down.

"Of course," I said.

He nodded and returned to his coffee.

I spent the two days before the banquet in the infirmary at dawn, the wolf-bone case open across my lap, memorizing the account codes and the marginalia in Theo's precise hand. Miller present. Miller approved. Miller signed. I traced the transmission sequence Hoffman had sent until I could execute it without looking.

My hands trembled twice while I worked. Small tremors, brief, gone before I could catalog them. The fatigue sat behind my eyes like a weight that would not lift no matter how much I slept.

The wolfsbane was still in me. The damage was still moving forward.

I was running out of time.

---

The ceremonial gown was deep silver, floor-length, the sleeves long and the collar high. Ironveil's Luna gown, worn once a year, unmistakable.

I stood before the mirror in our quarters and braided my hair back and thought about my mother pressing wolfsbane into my palm.

The great hall was already full when I entered on Miller's arm. Four visiting Alphas at the head table. Their Lunas seated beside them. Ranked wolves from every allied pack, watching Ironveil present itself.

We crossed toward the Alpha table.

And Rose walked in behind us.

I heard the room shift before I saw her. The murmur cutting off mid-sentence. The scrape of a chair somewhere in the back. I turned, because everyone had turned, and there she was in the doorway.

The same silver. The same cut. The same high collar. Her hair braided back exactly as mine was.

She smiled — small, deliberate — and began to walk toward the Alpha table.

Miller did not react. He kept his hand at the small of my back and continued to our seats as if nothing were happening, as if the entire hall of visiting nobility were not watching the Ironveil Luna and the woman dressed as her cross the same stone floor toward the same chair.

Rose reached the Luna's seat first.

She placed her hand on the back of the chair.

I did not raise my voice. I did not need to.

"That seat is the Luna's."

The words landed in the silence like a stone dropped into still water. Every visiting Alpha turned. Every visiting Luna turned. Rose's smile did not slip, but her hand stilled on the chair back.

Miller moved.

His palm cracked against the back of my hand where it rested on the table edge, hard enough that the sound carried. He pulled the chair out for Rose and seated her himself.

Rose sat. Looked up at me. Smirked.

The visiting Lunas did not look away.

I stood very still. The mark on my neck throbbed. Inside my chest, the pressure crested — furious, sustained — and the wolfsbane still in my system met it and everything in me tilted sideways.

My vision whited at the edges.

My knees buckled.

I hit the stone floor and the convulsions took me. My spine arched. Breath locked in my chest. I could hear voices — closer this time, sharper — and one of the visiting Lunas was on her feet, moving toward me.

Miller did not move.

Someone lifted me. I did not see who. The ceiling of the great hall passed above me in blurred torchlight, and then the corridor to the infirmary, and just before the darkness closed I saw the visiting Lunas' faces still turned toward the Alpha table.

Witnesses. All of them.

And then nothing.

The infirmary ceiling was the first thing I saw when I woke, and the second thing was the phone in my hand.

I didn't remember taking it out. My fingers had done the work without asking my mind. Chase's message had come in during the night — three short lines, coded in the shorthand we'd built over weeks of smuggled communication.

*Ashford's people in the diplomatic circuit. Solstice reports moving through Council channels. Watch the door.*

I read it twice. Then I closed the message and did not let myself feel anything.

Relief was not a currency I could spend. Not yet. Caelan Ashford's operatives being in the room when I convulsed at Miller's feet was useful. It was not enough. Reports of a mistreated Luna moved through channels every day in a hundred packs and never reached a tribunal because the Council did not act on rumors. The Council acted on evidence.

I had the ledgers. I had Hoffman's transmission sequence memorized to muscle. I had four visiting Lunas who had seen Miller strike my hand and seat Rose in my chair.

I did not have the balcony.

Without the balcony, Miller kept his aura. Without the balcony, he would claim Rose acted alone and he was deceived, and every Alpha at the tribunal would nod because that was the story a man like Miller was allowed to tell.

I slid the phone beneath the mattress and pressed my thumb against the mark on my neck.

I needed the crystal.

---

The second night after the Solstice, the door opened at an hour when doors did not open.

I kept my eyes closed. Footsteps — soft, familiar, weighted with the specific quiet of someone who had spent twenty years learning how not to be heard. Linens rustled. A stack was set down on the side table.

Then the footsteps came to the edge of my bed.

"Luna."

Marceline's voice was low. Not a whisper — a whisper carried further than she wanted. Just quiet.

I opened my eyes.

She stood beside the bed with her hands folded at her waist, and her face in the dim lamplight was the face of a woman who had already decided and was here to complete an action that could no longer be reconsidered. She did not look afraid. She looked emptied out and finally still.

"I have something for you," she said.

She reached into the fold of her apron and withdrew a small object wrapped in gray cloth. She set it in my palm and closed my fingers over it herself, and her hands did not shake once.

The cloth fell away.

A memory crystal. Pale, faceted, warm from being carried against her body. I had seen crystals like it in the pack's domestic surveillance archive — the kind that held forty-eight hours of unaltered footage and could be played only through a keyed interface.

"The playback console is in the second-floor archive room," she said. "Behind the linen cabinet. The key is taped beneath the third shelf. Darian sweeps that corridor at four and again at eleven. Nothing in between."

I could not speak.

"It shows her push him," Marceline said. Her voice did not shift. "It shows him in the doorway. He does not move. He does not call out. He watches until Theo goes over, and then he turns and walks back inside."

My hand closed around the crystal so tightly the facets pressed into my palm.

"Marceline —"

"My son was on the rotation." She said it flatly. "They told me if I stayed quiet he would live. I stayed quiet." A pause, and now for the first time her voice moved, only a little. "I stayed quiet the night of the Harvest Banquet. I stayed quiet at Solstice. I have counted the nights, Luna. I am not going to count another one."

I looked at her.

She did not look away.

"If they find me before you transmit," she said, "my son knows to run. That is arranged. Do not spend a minute of your time on us. Send it."

"Marceline."

"Send it, Luna."

She turned. She walked to the door with the same quiet she had walked in with. She did not look back. The door closed behind her and the latch caught and the corridor beyond was silent again.

I opened my hand.

The crystal lay in my palm, pale and warm and small enough that my fingers closed around it completely. Inside it — held in whatever material the pack's surveillance systems used to store the truth — was my brother going over a railing, and my mate standing in a doorway, and the exact moment the man whose mark burned on my neck chose to let a ranked wolf of his own pack die.

The corroborating evidence. The piece Hoffman said I needed. The final wall of the Council case.

I pressed my thumb against the mark on my neck.

Something flickered through the bond — faint, distant, the emotional channel picking up a shift it could not yet name.

Miller's satisfaction, curdling.

I closed my fist around the crystal.

Across the pack house, two floors below, a door opened.