I didn't sleep the first night in Silvercrest. I told myself it was the mattress, too firm, unfamiliar under my hips. But the truth was simpler. My mind wouldn't stop working, and for the first time in months, that felt like relief instead of exhaustion.

Waffles curled against my feet while I spread Silvercrest's alliance files across the floor of my new quarters, the folder the Beta had given me now three inches thick with cross-referenced maps and treaty summaries. I read until my eyes burned. Somewhere around three in the morning, my hand paused over the eastern border section. The numbers didn't line up. Silvercrest had been negotiating grain tariffs with the Colton Ridge Pack for six months, and nobody on this side of the table had noticed that Colton Ridge's Beta was quietly courting a secondary agreement with a pack two territories over — one that would gut Silvercrest's leverage completely.

I'd seen that exact maneuver before. Benjamin had almost fallen for a version of it three years ago, and I was the one who caught it then, too.

My pen moved fast after that. By sunrise, I had six pages of revision — new terms, a counter-proposal, language tight enough that no Alpha could wriggle out of it later. I showered, dressed, and walked into the administrative center before my first scheduled briefing even existed on anyone's calendar.

The Beta looked up from his desk, startled. "Ms. Bishop. Your orientation isn't until Thursday."

"I found something that can't wait until Thursday." I set the pages in front of him. "Colton Ridge is playing both sides of your border talks. If you sign the current draft, you'll lose your northern grain route within a year."

He read the first page slowly. Then the second, faster. By the third, his eyebrows had climbed halfway up his forehead.

"You caught this in one night?"

"I caught this in one night with a folder you handed me yesterday afternoon," I said. "Imagine what I'll find with proper access."

He didn't answer that. He just gathered the pages, squared them against the desk, and walked them straight into the back office without another word — no promise, no comment, nothing I could hold onto except the fact that he hadn't dismissed me.

Two days passed in silence. I told myself the silence didn't mean anything. I told myself a lot of things that week, mostly to keep from thinking about the hollow place in my chest where my wolf used to pace and mutter and argue with me at three in the morning. She didn't do any of that anymore. She didn't do anything at all. I pressed a hand to my ribs sometimes, just to check if she was still breathing in there, somewhere underneath the pup.

On the third day, the Beta called me back in. "You've been assigned to the eastern negotiation session. Full delegation status." He said it flatly, like it cost him something to admit I'd earned it that fast. "Prepare your proposal for presentation. You'll represent Silvercrest's position directly."

I didn't ask who else would be in the room. I should have. I didn't think to.

That night, Reese's voice cut into my mind-link so sharply I nearly dropped my mug.

*"You sitting down?"* he said. *"Because you're gonna want to be sitting down for this."*

"I'm always sitting down these days, Reese. Growing a person does that."

*"Fair. Okay. So. Ironmaw held its first pack meeting since you left."* A pause, the kind Reese used for dramatic effect even over a mind-link. *"Benjamin's aura flickered. In front of everyone. Three of his own senior warriors just — sat there. Didn't submit right away. You know what that does to a room full of wolves who've spent their whole lives reading dominance off an Alpha's voice?"*

I closed my eyes. Something in me — not my wolf, something smaller and more human — wanted to feel nothing at all. "What happened?"

*"He slammed his fist on the table like a toddler having a tantrum. Screamed at them to pay attention. And Serena—"* Reese's voice dropped, almost gentle for once. *"His voice cracked. Like actually cracked, mid-command. I heard it secondhand from a cousin who was there. Said it sounded like a radio losing signal."*

I should have felt vindicated. Instead I felt strangely far away from it, like I was hearing about a stranger's misfortune.

*"There's more,"* Reese said. *"Word is the whole pack house smells like you now. Cedar, honey, all of it, soaked into the walls. He had someone bleach the bedroom top to bottom. By morning it was back. Nobody can explain it. Healers are calling it a rejection echo — apparently it happens when you sever a bond that was never supposed to break."*

"That's not my problem anymore," I said, and meant it, mostly.

*"No,"* Reese agreed. *"It's his. Every miserable second of it."*

I thanked him, ended the link, and sat a long time in the quiet of my new quarters, one hand on the pages of my eastern negotiation proposal, the other resting over the place where my daughter turned slow, unhurried circles beneath my ribs. Somewhere behind Ironmaw's walls, a man was scrubbing at a scent he'd never scrub away. Somewhere inside me, a wolf who used to answer every knock stayed silent, curled tight and cold.

I didn't know yet which one of us the Moon Goddess was still watching. But for the first time since the Banquet, I let myself wonder if she wasn't finished with either of us at all.

The eastern negotiation room had a long glass table and too many chairs for the number of people who mattered. I sat between the Beta and a junior liaison, my proposal squared in front of me, and waited for Colton Ridge's representative to notice I existed.

His name was Garrett Voss, a broad-shouldered Delta-turned-negotiator with a handshake he offered to every man at the table and skipped entirely when he reached me. I didn't take it personally. I'd met a hundred wolves like him — the kind who measured a woman's usefulness by whether she was carrying his coffee or his child, and I was visibly doing the latter, so in his mind that settled the matter before I'd said a word.

"Let's keep this efficient," Voss said, addressing the Beta like I was furniture. "We're prepared to offer the same terms as last quarter, with a small adjustment to the grain corridor allocation."

"A small adjustment," I repeated, "that reduces Silvercrest's northern access by eleven percent while your secondary agreement with the Hallow Pine territory expands your southern corridor by nearly double that. I have the correspondence dated three weeks ago, if you'd like to review it."

The room went quiet in that particular way rooms go quiet when someone has said something true that wasn't supposed to be said out loud. Voss's jaw worked. "That agreement is unrelated to these talks."

"It's entirely related. You're using this table to secure grain access you intend to resell through Hallow Pine at a premium once Silvercrest's route is compromised." I slid the first document across the table — the correspondence itself, dated and stamped. Then the second — a cost projection showing exactly what that premium would net him over eighteen months. Then the third, the one that made his mouth go tight: a counter-draft, already written, closing every gap he'd planned to exploit.

"You prepared a counter before I'd even presented my terms," he said, and for the first time he looked at me instead of through me.

"I prepared a counter before you walked in the door, Mr. Voss. I've read your pack's negotiating history for the last four years. This is the fourth time you've tried this maneuver. It worked twice."

He didn't have an answer for that. Nobody at the table did. The Beta beside me exhaled slowly through his nose, the kind of breath a man takes when he's recalculating everything he assumed about the person next to him. By the time the session ended, Silvercrest had terms that had been stalled since spring, and Voss shook my hand on the way out — not out of respect, maybe, but because he no longer had the option of pretending I wasn't the reason he'd lost.

I didn't notice the side door until the room had mostly emptied. It stood half open, and through the gap I caught the outline of a tall figure, utterly still, watching. Dominic Ashford. He didn't step forward. He didn't say a word. He simply watched me gather my papers with an expression I couldn't read, and then he was gone before I'd finished packing my folder.

Reese's voice found me that evening, while I sat with my feet propped up and Waffles snoring against my ankle. *"You'll never guess what your replacement's doing now,"* he said, in the tone of a man who'd been waiting all day to say it. *"She moved into Benjamin's second lodge. The one out past the ridge. Word is she's filming herself walking around in silk robes calling it 'a day in the life of a Luna.' Posted a whole video captioned 'blessed.' Pack's not buying it, though. Staff won't call her Luna to her face. She tried to reorganize the household rotation and half of them just — didn't show up."*

"She wanted the title," I said. "Nobody told her the title doesn't run itself."

*"Seven years of you running it doesn't just evaporate because Benjamin put a dress on her,"* Reese said, quieter now. "People remember who actually took care of them, Serena."

I let that settle without answering. It didn't feel like victory. It felt like watching weather happen somewhere far away.

The next morning I ran the warriors through formation drills on the training grounds, my voice raised over the wind, correcting stances that had gone soft from complacency. Marcus Hale watched me with his arms crossed the whole session, waiting, I could tell, for me to be wrong about something.

"This formation collapses under real pressure," he said finally, loud enough for the others to hear. "Sound in theory. Falls apart the second bodies start moving fast."

"Then show me," I said.

He ran it. Twice. The second time, his own team held longer than they had in the drills he'd designed himself, and I watched something shift behind his eyes — not defeat, exactly. Recalculation.

He said nothing when it ended. But he fell into step beside me instead of across from me as the warriors dispersed, and from the tree line at the edge of the grounds, I felt Dominic's stillness like a held breath, watching, saying nothing at all.

The notification came through my phone three days after the Colton Ridge negotiation—a pack network alert, the kind that spreads like wildfire through every territory with a working internet connection. I was reviewing supply chain reports when the screen lit up, and I almost dismissed it entirely until I saw the header: *Ironmaw Pack Celebrates New Luna in Grand Mate Ceremony.*

I didn't open it. I set the phone face-down on my desk and went back to the supply chains. Waffles lifted his head from under my chair, ears pricked, like he'd heard something I hadn't. I scratched behind them until he settled again.

Reese's voice crashed into my mind-link an hour later. *"Please tell me you saw that absolute circus Benjamin just broadcasted to the entire pack network."*

"I saw the notification," I said. "I didn't open it."

*"Good. Don't. It's pathetic. White dress, full Alpha regalia, enough flowers to choke a garden center. He's got photographers, a three-tier cake, the works. Posted it everywhere—Instagram, the pack forums, even sent a formal announcement to the regional council like anyone outside Ironmaw gives a damn who he's sleeping with now."* Reese paused. *"He's waiting for you to react, Serena. He wants you to see it."*

"Then he's going to be disappointed."

*"You're not even curious?"*

"No." And I wasn't. There was no curiosity left in me for Benjamin Davis, no phantom ache where the bond used to live. Just a clean, empty space that had stopped hurting weeks ago.

Reese was quiet for a moment. *"You know what? That's worse for him than anything you could've said. He's probably refreshing those posts every five minutes waiting for a comment that's never coming."*

"That's not my problem anymore, Reese."

*"No,"* he agreed, and I could hear the grin in his voice. *"It's really, really not."*

I ended the link and went back to work. My phone buzzed twice more that evening—other wolves I'd known in passing, probably expecting me to fall apart publicly or issue some kind of statement. I turned the notifications off and took Waffles for a walk instead, letting the cool Silvercrest evening air settle against my skin like something close to peace.

Dominic appeared at my office door two days later, just past six in the evening when most of the administrative center had emptied out. He didn't knock. He just stood in the doorway holding a file folder, his expression unreadable in the low light.

"Ms. Bishop."

I looked up from the treaty draft I'd been annotating. "Your Highness."

"I have a border dispute file. The eastern ridge, near the Thornfield territory line. My Betas have been circling it for three weeks without resolution." He stepped inside, set the folder on my desk. "I'd value your assessment."

I opened it. Read the first two pages. "This isn't a border dispute. It's a water rights issue disguised as a border dispute because Thornfield's Alpha doesn't want to admit his pack's reservoir management has been incompetent for five years."

Dominic's mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but close. "That was my suspicion as well."

"Then why bring it to me?"

"Because my Betas are too polite to say it that plainly, and I wanted to hear someone confirm I wasn't imagining the incompetence." He pulled the chair across from my desk and sat without asking, which should have felt presumptuous but somehow didn't. "You have a way of cutting through pretense, Ms. Bishop. It's efficient."

I handed the file back. "Thornfield needs a hydrology consultant, not a treaty revision. Send them the contact information for the firm that helped Silvercrest three years ago. They'll fix the problem or expose it publicly, and either way you'll have resolution within a month."

He took the file but didn't stand. "You've been reviewing Silvercrest's old water management records?"

"I've been reviewing all of Silvercrest's records. It's my job."

"Your job is eastern alliance coordination."

"My job is whatever makes this territory stronger," I said. "The job description is a starting point, not a ceiling."

Dominic studied me for a long moment, his dark eyes unreadable. Waffles chose that moment to emerge from under my desk and pad over to him, tail wagging. Dominic reached down without hesitation and scratched behind his ears, and something in my chest loosened at the sight—this powerful, unapproachable Lycan Prince, sitting in my cramped office at the end of a long day, petting my dog like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"He likes you," I said.

"Dogs are better judges of character than most wolves." Dominic stood, folder in hand. "Thank you for the assessment, Ms. Bishop. I'll follow your recommendation."

He was halfway to the door when I spoke again. "You didn't need my assessment. You already knew what the problem was."

He paused, glanced back. "No. But I wanted to see if you'd tell me the truth even when it made someone else look incompetent. Most liaisons would have softened it."

"I'm not most liaisons."

"No," Dominic said quietly. "You're not."

He left without another word, and I sat in the gathering dark of my office, one hand resting on the place where my daughter turned slow circles beneath my ribs, and tried not to think about the way his voice had sounded when he'd said that—like he'd been confirming something he'd already decided.

Reese arrived at Silvercrest two days later under the official pretext of border patrol coordination. We met for dinner in one of the territory's smaller dining halls, away from the main pack house, and he wasted exactly thirty seconds on pleasantries before launching into his real report.

"Benjamin's aura is dying," he said flatly, cutting into his steak. "And I don't mean flickering. I mean visibly dimming in front of his own wolves. Three of his senior warriors have already started quiet inquiries with other packs about transfer options. Nobody's saying it out loud yet, but everyone's thinking it—he's not going to last as Alpha."

I took a sip of water. "And Alondra?"

"She's moved into the secondary lodge full-time. Won't even sleep in the main pack house anymore because the scent situation's gotten so bad. Cedar and honey everywhere, soaked into the walls, the furniture, his clothes. He had the entire bedroom stripped and repainted. By morning it was back." Reese leaned forward. "Healers are calling it a rejection echo. Apparently it happens when you sever a bond the Moon Goddess never intended to break. The scent haunts the place where the bond lived, and there's no way to scrub it out. It just—exists. Forever."

I set my glass down carefully. "That's not my problem."

"I know." Reese studied me. "You really don't care, do you? I thought maybe you were just putting on a brave face, but you genuinely don't give a damn what happens to him."

"I cared for seven years, Reese. I ran his alliances, managed his pack, stood beside him through every challenge. And he looked me in the eye and rejected me in front of everyone who mattered." I met his gaze. "I'm done caring. He made sure of that."

Reese nodded slowly. "Good. He doesn't deserve your grief."

We finished dinner talking about border patrol logistics, pack transfer protocols, everything except the man slowly unraveling two territories away. When Reese finally stood to leave, he gripped my shoulder once, firm and steady.

"You're going to be fine, Serena. Better than fine."

I watched him go, then walked back to my quarters with Waffles at my side, the cool night air filling my lungs, and for the first time since the Banquet, I let myself believe him.