The message on Mateo's desk was time-stamped 9:47 p.m., three hours after he'd promised he'd be home for our anniversary dinner. I read it twice before my fingers went cold.

Coordinates. A cabin at the northern lake. And one name I hadn't heard spoken aloud in three years.

*Romina Watson.*

The candles I'd lit for us were guttering behind me. Mateo's favorite meal sat cold under a silver lid. I remember the exact way the paper felt—rough, real, not a nightmare I could shake off. And then, somewhere deep in the hollow place my wolf had lived silent for three years, something *stirred.* Not a warm stir. A low, soundless vibration. Like ice cracking on a lake in the middle of the night.

I took the keys off the hook and I ran.

---

The forest smelled wrong the whole way there. Wolfsbane, faint but layered under something floral I'd never scented before—a woman's skin, close to Mateo's, mixed with the sweat of a body that had been pressed against his. My wolf didn't rise. My stomach did.

I found the cabin exactly where the coordinates said it would be. One window, warm and yellow in the black trees.

I didn't need to look for long.

Mateo was standing with his forehead bowed to hers. Her fingers were curled around his jaw the way a woman touches a man she owns. His face—the face I had woken up beside for a thousand mornings—was crumpled in a kind of anguished relief I had never once seen him wear for me.

I could have turned around. I could have.

Instead I opened the door.

"Mateo."

He went rigid, like something inside him had snapped taut. Romina's mouth curved. Slowly. As if she had been waiting for this exact moment and had rehearsed the shape of the smile.

"Explain," I said.

He didn't.

He didn't look at me. He looked at the floor between us. And then his eyes flickered—the specific flicker I recognized as a mind-link going out—and I understood, in a single cold second, that he was not going to speak a word to me at all.

He was calling his warriors.

---

They came fast. Six of them, half-shifted, ringing the clearing outside the cabin in a horseshoe of muzzles and shoulders. Caden, his Beta, arrived last, and I watched the exact instant Caden registered what was happening. His face went white. He did not step forward. He did not step back. He just—stood.

Mateo turned to me.

"Jenna Simmons." His voice came out wrapped in Alpha tone, and the sound went through my jaw like a nail. My throat closed. My voice died mid-breath. "You will not speak."

I could not speak.

He stepped close. He tilted my chin. He pressed his canines to the mark on my neck—the mark he had put there three years ago, on this same night, with my hands in his hair and the moon on the water—and he spoke the unbinding words softly, almost tenderly, the way you'd whisper a lullaby to something you were putting down.

The mark went cold first. Then empty. Like a door closing on an empty room.

Inside my head my wolf—dormant, silent, the wolf I had grieved as absent for three whole years—*screamed.* One raw tearing sound. And then she was gone. Just gone. A silence so total I staggered.

My knees hit the pine needles.

Mateo straightened. He did not look at me when he spoke to the assembled warriors. He looked at Romina.

"She was never my true mate," he said. "Only a placeholder. She is stripped of pack access as of this moment. Escort her to the Omega quarters."

Romina made a small, wounded sound and pressed her face into his shoulder.

I did not cry. I did not beg. I could not have if I'd wanted to—the Alpha tone was still locked around my throat like a collar. Caden was the one who stepped forward and gripped my elbow, and his hand was trembling. I looked up at him. His mouth worked once. He said nothing.

They walked me back through the forest I had run through.

---

The Omega quarters were under the pack house, in a hallway with a bulb that flickered. My cot smelled like other people's sweat. There was no window. When Caden shut the door I heard the lock turn, and then his footsteps did not move for a long time. Then they did.

I sat on the edge of the cot.

I pressed two fingers to the place on my neck where the mark had been. The scar was there, pale and dead, like a coin someone had left on my skin. I could not feel the pack bond. I could not feel my wolf. I could not feel anything at all except the fact that I was still, somehow, breathing.

I took my leather journal out of my inside pocket. I opened it to a blank page.

I wrote one line.

*Find out how Romina came back.*

I closed it.

---

The door opened again before dawn. I braced. But it was Eleanor—Mateo's mother, the former Luna—slipping in with her shawl clutched at her throat and her eyes red and a small cloth bundle of herbs pressed to her chest.

"Jenna," she whispered. She took my hands. Her fingers were freezing. "What he has done is not lawful. The Council will hear of it. I swear to you on the Moon—"

"Eleanor." My voice came back small, but it came. I held her hands harder. I asked the only question that mattered. "Three years ago. When Romina drowned. Was a body ever recovered from the river?"

Eleanor went very still.

"No," she whispered. "Never."

Eleanor left before the pack house stirred. I sat with her herb bundle in my lap and listened to the morning shift through the floorboards above me—footsteps, voices, the distant clatter of the kitchen. Normal sounds. The kind of sounds a pack makes when nothing has changed.

Except everything had.

I heard Romina's voice first. She had a particular pitch when she was giving orders—bright and sweet, like a bell with a crack in it. Through the ceiling I caught fragments. *Remove that. Throw those out. No, all of it.* A pause. Then something heavy dragged across the floor directly above my head. The Luna suite. My suite, twelve hours ago.

I pressed my fingers to the dead scar on my neck and breathed.

By midmorning, word had filtered down even to the Omega corridor. The omegas assigned to carry out her instructions moved past my door with their eyes averted and their jaws tight. One of them—a girl named Petra who used to help me press the herb cuttings every spring—stopped in the hallway just long enough to meet my eyes. She didn't say anything. She was holding a bundle of dried rosemary, the kind I'd been growing on the Luna suite windowsill for two years. It was going in the trash. I could see it in the way she held it, loose and apologetic.

I nodded at her. *It's all right.* It wasn't. But it wasn't her fault either.

From the yard, Barnaby's growl ran on and on like a low engine that couldn't find a gear to stop in. Nobody went near him.

---

She came in the early afternoon.

I heard the click of her heels on the corridor stone before the door opened—a deliberate sound, the kind you make when you want someone to know you're coming and to be afraid. The door swung in and Romina stood in the frame with a small, sorrowful expression arranged carefully on her face. She was holding a cloth-wrapped parcel. Food, probably. The performance required a prop.

"Jenna." Her voice was soft, full of practiced grief. "I wanted to check on you. This must be so hard."

I was sitting on the cot with my journal open. I did not stand up.

"Close the door," I said.

She did. And the moment the latch caught, the sorrow dropped off her face like a coat she'd been too warm in. What was underneath was not anger. It was something quieter and more comfortable than anger. Contempt.

"Little seat-warmer." She set the parcel down on the floor without looking at it. "I almost feel bad. Three years holding the chair warm. That's dedication."

I said nothing.

"No wolf." She tilted her head. "No real bond. Did you honestly think it was going to last? He marked you because the pack needed a Luna and I was—unavailable. That's all you ever were. A placeholder. His words, not mine." She smiled. "Well. Also his words."

I looked at her. I took my time with it. I let the silence sit.

Then I said, very calmly, "How long did the wolfsbane take to clear your system after you staged the river?"

The smile stopped.

Not faded. Stopped. Like a clock someone had reached out and grabbed by the hands.

For three full seconds she didn't move. Then her hand went to her collarbone—a fast, involuntary press of fingers, there and gone—and her eyes did something I hadn't seen them do before. They went flat. Not angry. Flat.

She picked up the parcel from the floor. She walked to the door. She opened it without turning around.

"Disappear quietly," she said. "Before things get worse."

She left.

I wrote in my journal: *Wolfsbane. Confirmed reaction. She knows I know.*

Then I underlined it.

---

I was almost asleep when she screamed.

It was a good scream. Loud and wet and ragged at the edges, the kind that pulls every instinct in a body toward it before the brain has a chance to ask questions. I was on my feet before I was fully awake, standing in my doorway, and the smell hit me at the same moment—silver, burning, the specific scorched-copper stench of a silver wound on wolf flesh.

Romina was in the corridor, twenty feet away, clutching her forearm to her chest. The sleeve of her white blouse was dark and wet. Her face was a ruin of tears.

"She attacked me—" Her voice broke on cue. "She had silver—she—"

Mateo came at a run from the direction of the stairs. He crossed the distance in seconds and caught her before she could fall, and she pressed her face into his chest and shook. He looked over her head at me.

I stood in my doorway. Both arms bare. Both hands empty.

"Mateo." My voice was steady. I don't know how. "Look at the angle of the wound. Look at which arm. She—"

"Enough." The Alpha tone hit me like a wall. My voice cut off. My throat locked.

He held Romina tighter. He did not look at her arm. He did not look at the corridor for a silver blade. He looked only at me, and his face was the face of a man who had already decided.

"You are banished from Shadowridge territory," he said. "Gone by dawn. If you are found on pack land after sunrise, you will be treated as a rogue trespasser."

Romina made a small, broken sound against his chest.

I could not speak. The tone held. So I just—looked at him. I looked at him until he was the one who turned away.

I went back inside. I sat down. I opened my journal to a fresh page.

I wrote: *By dawn, then.*

Below it, after a moment, I wrote: *Amanda.*

I left at first light.

The forest was gray and wet, the kind of morning that sits heavy on your shoulders and doesn't lift. I had my leather journal tucked inside my jacket, Eleanor's herb bundle pressed against my collarbone, and the clothes I'd been wearing when they locked me in that room. That was it. Everything else—three years of careful work, of building a home inside someone else's walls—stayed behind.

The fence at the border was chain-link, rusted at the posts. On the other side, Barnaby threw himself against the kennel gate. Again. Again. The sound was raw and animal and wrong, the kind of sound that pulls at something deep in your chest even when you know you can't fix it.

I stopped at the fence post. Just for three seconds. I pressed my palm flat against the cold metal and felt the vibration of his howling travel up through my wrist.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

Then I crossed.

The moment my feet touched Hollowcreek soil, the pack bond I'd lived inside for three years—the one that had gone silent and cold when Mateo severed the mark—finally, fully, disappeared. Not like a door closing. Like a room that had never existed at all. I felt lighter. Emptier. I didn't know which was worse.

I kept walking.

---

Amanda found me before I'd made it half a mile into Hollowcreek territory.

She came at a run through the trees, boots loud on the wet leaves, and when she reached me she didn't slow down—she just grabbed my shoulders and looked at my face like she was checking for broken bones.

"You look like hell," she said.

"I feel worse."

"Good. You should." She let go and stepped back, breathing hard. Her jaw was tight. "That bastard. That absolute—" She bit off whatever word came next and shook her head. "No. We're not doing this here. Come on."

She turned and started walking, fast and sure, and I followed. I didn't ask where we were going. I didn't have the energy to ask.

We walked for twenty minutes in silence. Amanda's cottage sat at the edge of Hollowcreek's main settlement—small, wood-framed, with a porch that sagged on one side and a chimney that leaked smoke into the morning fog. She pushed the door open and held it.

"Inside," she said. "Now."

I went in.

The cottage was warm. There was a fire already going in the grate, and the smell of coffee so strong it made my eyes water. Amanda shut the door behind us and locked it—two bolts, top and bottom—then crossed to the kitchen and poured a mug without asking if I wanted one.

"Sit," she said, shoving the mug into my hands. "Drink. Then tell me everything, and I mean everything, because I'm about five seconds away from marching back to Shadowridge and starting a war."

I sat. I drank. The coffee was black and bitter and scalding, and it was the first thing that had tasted real in two days.

"Romina burned herself," I said. "With silver. Then screamed that I did it."

Amanda's face went very still. "And Mateo believed her."

"He didn't even look at the wound. He just—" I stopped. I pressed my fingers to the scar on my neck. The dead place. "He'd already decided."

Amanda set her own mug down hard enough that coffee slopped over the rim. She didn't seem to notice. She was staring at the wall, jaw working, hands curled into fists on the table.

"I'm going to kill him," she said quietly. "I'm actually going to kill him."

"Amanda—"

"No." She looked at me. Her eyes were blazing. "You don't get to defend him. Not after this. Not after—" She stopped. Took a breath. Uncurled her fists. "Okay. Okay. We're not killing him yet. First, we're getting you safe. Then we're getting you answers. Then—maybe—we kill him."

Despite everything, I almost smiled.

Amanda stood and crossed to a cabinet in the corner. She pulled out a worn leather satchel and dropped it on the table between us.

"Hollowcreek keeps herb archives," she said. "Medical records, historical logs, everything our healers have documented for the last century. You want to know how Romina faked her death? Start there."

I stared at the satchel. Then at her.

"Your Alpha—"

"Will grant you sanctuary." Amanda's voice was flat and certain. "I'm presenting your case tomorrow morning. Unlawful mark severance, no tribunal, public humiliation, and a banishment based on a frame-up so obvious a pup could see through it. He'll say yes."

"And if Mateo retaliates?"

Amanda smiled. It was not a kind smile. "Let him try."

She sat back down, pulled a knife from her boot, and started sharpening it against a whetstone she kept on the windowsill. The sound was rhythmic and cold. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

I opened the satchel.

---

That night, I sat at Amanda's kitchen table with my journal open and three centuries of Hollowcreek herb documentation spread in front of me. Amanda sat by the door, still sharpening that knife, her presence a solid wall between me and the rest of the world.

I found wolfsbane in the second volume.

The entry was clinical, written in the tight script of a healer who'd seen too much to waste words. *Wolfsbane (Aconitum lycoctonum): ingested in controlled doses over 72-96 hours, suppresses scent signature at the hormonal level. Used historically to evade bond-tracking during territorial wars. Mimics biological death to any wolf attempting scent-trace. Requires precise dosing—overdose is fatal. Antidote: time and distance.*

I read it three times.

Then I opened my journal and started writing.

Romina's bond with Mateo formed on a Tuesday. The river crossing—the supposed drowning—happened on Friday. Three days. Exactly long enough for a full suppression cycle.

No body recovered. No scent trail. Just timing and chemistry.

I wrote it all down. Every detail. Every connection. I drew a timeline. I underlined the conclusion in heavy ink: *She didn't drown. She disappeared.*

When I finally looked up, the fire had burned low and Amanda was watching me.

"You found something," she said.

I nodded.

She stood, crossed to the table, and looked down at the open journal. She read in silence. Then she looked at me, and her smile was sharp and cold and satisfied.

"Good," she said. "Now we prove it."