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."

I didn't expect to hear about Shadowridge's unraveling from Amanda's kitchen window.

But gossip travels fast between neighboring packs, especially when it involves an Alpha who's visibly falling apart. Amanda's cousin—a warrior who trained with Shadowridge's patrol team last summer—stopped by on his way to the eastern border. He sat at the table with his coffee and talked like he was delivering weather reports, but I heard every word.

Mateo was pacing the pack house at three in the morning. Again. For the third night running.

Caden found him in the main hall with his shirt half-buttoned and his eyes red, muttering about supply routes and archived contracts no one could locate. The Eastern Hollowfield negotiations—the ones I'd spent two months preparing terms for, the ones that were supposed to close this week—collapsed because nobody knew where the files were. I knew where they were. Top drawer of the Luna suite desk, labeled in my handwriting, organized by date and territory.

But I wasn't there anymore.

Amanda's cousin took another sip of coffee and said, almost casually, that Mateo's wolf snapped at Caden during a routine briefing yesterday. Not a warning growl. A full snap, teeth bared, the kind of break in control that makes a Beta take two steps back and reassess whether his Alpha is stable.

I sat very still and said nothing.

Amanda, leaning against the counter with her arms crossed, said what I couldn't. "Good. Let him fall apart."

Her cousin left twenty minutes later. Amanda locked the door behind him, turned to me, and raised one eyebrow.

"You're not going to say it, so I will," she said. "He's collapsing without you. And he doesn't even know it yet."

I looked down at my journal. I'd been cataloging wolfsbane antidotes for the last two hours, cross-referencing historical records with modern healing texts. My handwriting was steady. My hands were not.

"He made his choice," I said quietly.

Amanda's expression softened, just slightly. "Yeah. He did."

---

The second report came two days later, this time from a Hollowcreek elder who'd attended a cross-pack summit dinner at Shadowridge. She was old enough to speak bluntly and didn't bother softening the details.

Romina had been asked to host the communal dinner for the senior warriors—a traditional Luna responsibility, one I'd handled dozens of times. She arrived forty minutes late wearing a dress better suited for a gala than a working dinner. She didn't review the seating arrangements. She didn't coordinate with the kitchen. She stood at the head of the table and delivered a tearful, rambling speech about her miraculous survival and her undying devotion to Mateo.

The elder paused in her retelling, took a sip of tea, and said, "Several of the older warriors exchanged glances. The kind of glances that say more than words."

I knew those warriors. I'd served beside them for three years. They didn't suffer fools, and they didn't forgive incompetence.

The elder set down her cup. "Dorian—the former Alpha—he set down his fork halfway through her speech and never picked it up again. Just sat there with his jaw tight and his eyes on his plate. Eleanor touched his hand once. He didn't respond. They left early."

I felt something twist in my chest. Dorian and Eleanor had loved me. I knew that. They'd told me, quietly and often, in the small ways that mattered—Eleanor's herb bundles, Dorian's nod of approval when I mediated a territory dispute, the way they both called me 'daughter' when no one else was listening.

They would have fought for me if they'd known what was coming. But Mateo moved too fast, and by the time they understood, I was already gone.

"They're ashamed of him," Amanda said flatly. She'd been listening from the doorway. "As they should be."

The elder nodded slowly, finished her tea, and left.

I went back to my journal and wrote: *Pack is fracturing. Romina cannot hold it. Mateo will not see it until it's too late.*

---

Barnaby arrived on the fourth day.

I was sitting on Amanda's porch with my journal open, reviewing my wolfsbane timeline for the third time, when I heard the crunch of boots on gravel. I looked up and saw a young pack member—barely twenty, with nervous eyes and a Shadowridge patrol jacket—leading Barnaby on a chain.

My heart stopped.

Barnaby saw me and lunged. The chain snapped taut. The young man stumbled, caught himself, and let go. Barnaby bolted across the yard and crashed into me hard enough to knock me back against the porch railing. He was shaking. His ribs were too prominent under his fur. He pressed his muzzle into my neck and made a sound I'd never heard from him before—a low, broken whine that felt like an accusation and a plea at the same time.

I wrapped my arms around him and held on.

The young pack member stood at the edge of the yard, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He wouldn't meet my eyes.

"Alpha Mateo sent him," he said quietly. "No message. Just—he said to bring the dog to you."

I looked up. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "No note?"

He shook his head. "No, ma'am."

Amanda appeared in the doorway behind me. She looked at the young man, then at Barnaby, then at me. Her jaw tightened.

"Tell your Alpha," she said, her voice cold and clear, "that sending the dog is the most honest thing he's done in weeks."

The young man flinched. He nodded once, turned, and left.

I buried my face in Barnaby's fur. He smelled like the pack house—wood smoke and pine and something faintly metallic that might have been Romina's perfume. I breathed through it. I held him tighter.

Amanda crouched beside me and rested one hand on my shoulder. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.

After a long time, I stood. Barnaby pressed against my leg and didn't move. I looked down at him, then at Amanda.

"I need to get back to work," I said.

Amanda nodded. "Yeah. You do."

I went inside. Barnaby followed. I sat down at the table, opened my journal, and kept writing.