They arrived on a Tuesday, which felt appropriate. Tuesdays had always been the day Maren Campbell preferred for difficult conversations — something about the distance from the weekend, she used to say, as though grief and obligation needed scheduling.

Sable brought me the notification herself. Two visitors at the gate. Low-ranking wolves. Claiming family.

I told her to put them in the east receiving room.

Emy was already behind my chair when I walked in. I don't know how she knew to be there. She just was — arms crossed, expression neutral, the specific neutrality she wore when she was prepared to remove someone from a building.

Maren sat across from me in a wool coat that had seen better years. Douglas sat beside her with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the floor, which was where Douglas's eyes usually were when Maren was doing the talking.

She started with the years. She always started with the years.

The food, the shelter, the school fees, the winters that were hard on everyone, the sacrifices that nobody ever acknowledged. Her voice had that particular texture — soft at the edges, iron in the middle — that I had grown up mistaking for love. I sat with my hands flat on my thighs and I let her finish. Every word. I did not interrupt. I did not react.

When she stopped, the room was quiet.

"We just think," Maren said, softer now, pivoting to the ask, "that going back to Sterling would be the sensible thing. For everyone. He's willing to reconsider the terms. You'd still be Luna. You'd still have —"

"What did you put in my food?"

The silence that followed was not the silence of an innocent person gathering their thoughts.

It was longer than that. Heavier. Douglas's hands pressed harder into his knees. Maren's mouth opened and then closed without producing a sound, and in that pause — that specific, damning pause — I had my answer. I had already suspected it. My wolf had known it since the night I walked out of Ironclad and felt, for the first time in my life, what my own body was supposed to feel like.

But suspicion and confirmation are different things, and I felt them land differently.

"You're dismissed from this territory," I said. My voice was the same as it had been all morning. "Both of you. You'll be escorted to the gate."

Maren found her voice then. She started again — sacrifice, difficulty, they had no choice, they were given no choice — but I was already standing, and Emmy was already moving, and I did not hear the rest of it.

---

Atticus was in his study. He was always in his study at this hour, which I had learned the way I learned most things about the Crescent Throne — by paying attention without announcing that I was doing it.

I knocked once and opened the door.

He looked up from his desk. He read my face in the way he had — quickly, without performance — and set down his pen.

"I need your investigators," I said. "I believe my wolf was chemically suppressed throughout my childhood. Wolfsbane compound, micro-dosed in food over a long period. I need the supply chain traced."

I did not explain how I knew. I did not offer the scene in the receiving room, or Maren's pause, or the eight years of a wolf that never came until the night everything broke open. He did not ask.

"Sable will start today," he said.

That was all.

I nodded and left, and I did not press my fingers to the back of my neck until I was in the corridor with the door closed behind me.

---

Sable worked fast. That was the word Emmy used — *fast* — when she relayed the preliminary report four days later, but what she meant was *thorough*, because Sable Vane did not move quickly so much as she moved without wasted motion, which produced the same result.

The supplier had a name. Doran Hale. Mid-ranking, rogue-adjacent, operating out of the eastern corridor for decades — predating Sterling's Alpha tenure by years. Long enough to have been in business when I was an infant. Long enough to have filled the first order.

Sable delivered the finding to Atticus's study in the early evening. I was already there, working through tribunal documentation at the side table he had stopped pretending was not mine.

The room went quiet when she said the name.

I picked up my pen. I wrote *Doran Hale* at the top of my evidence list in clean, unhurried letters. I underlined it once.

Sable left. Atticus did not speak. I turned back to my documents.

I felt him watching me — not intrusively, just present — and then I heard the quiet sound of him returning to his own work. We stayed like that for another hour, the fire burning low between us, the only sounds the scratch of pen on paper and the occasional shift of pages.

It was, I realized later, the most peaceful hour I had spent in eight years.

I did not know what to do with that, so I wrote another line of citations and let it sit.

The gift arrived on a Wednesday morning, wrapped in ceremonial black silk and tied with the silver cord that meant formal diplomatic protocol. I knew what it was before Sable said a word.

A mate-bond artifact box. Traditional. Ancient. The kind of thing an Alpha sent when he wanted to request reconsideration of a rejection and needed the ceremony to do the asking for him, because he could not do it himself.

Sterling had never been good at asking.

Sable set it on the receiving hall table without touching the silk. She had not touched the silk. That was the first thing I noticed — her hands were gloved, which they had not been when she walked in.

"I caught it when the outer wrapping shifted," she said. Her voice was flat and precise, the way it always was when she was reporting something that made her angry. "Same formulation as the supply chain documentation. Concentrated. Enough to suppress an awakened wolf for forty-eight hours, at minimum."

I looked at the box.

Atticus stood to my left, very still. The kind of still his court had learned to read. I had learned to read it too.

"May I," I said, and Sable moved aside.

I leaned forward and inhaled once, carefully, through the silk.

Wolfsbane. Deep and chemical beneath the cedar oil they had used to mask it, the same way you could smell iron beneath perfume if you knew what iron smelled like. I knew what it smelled like. I had been eating it in small doses for twenty-three years without knowing I was eating it, and now my wolf recognized it the way she recognized a predator — not with fear, exactly. With the clean, cold clarity of something identified.

I straightened.

"Call the scribes," I said.

---

The formal filing took forty minutes. I cited Lycan Council Statute Thirty-One, subsection nine: deliberate chemical harm to a ranked wolf on sovereign territory. I cited the supply chain documentation Sable had already compiled. I cited the delivery records, the diplomatic channel Sterling had used, the date and time of receipt.

I requested the immediate convening of a Lycan Council tribunal against Alpha Sterling Cross of the Ironclad Pack.

My voice did not change register once.

The scribes wrote everything down. Sable countersigned the evidence seal. Atticus stood at the edge of the room and did not speak, and I did not look at him until the scribes had gathered their materials and left.

When the door closed, the room was very quiet.

"Are you safe," he said.

Not a question, exactly. The way he said it — low, unhurried, the words placed with care — it landed more like something he needed to say aloud than something he needed answered.

"Yes," I said.

He nodded once. He did not say anything else. I picked up the evidence folder and went to my room to work.

---

Emmy found me outside after dark, sitting on the stone step with Waffles collapsed across my feet like a small, disreputable rug. He had eaten something he shouldn't have again. He always looked profoundly unbothered about it.

She sat beside me without asking. That was one of the things I had always loved about Emmy — she did not require an explanation before she decided to stay.

The tree line was dark. The Crescent Throne's forest pressed close at night, old fir and cedar, the kind of trees that had been standing before any of us were born and would be standing after. I had been staring at it for an hour and I was not sure what I was looking for.

"I just need to know it's almost over," I said.

Emmy was quiet for a moment.

"It is," she said.

Neither of us slept much.

In the morning I was back at the side table in Atticus's study before he arrived, tribunal documents spread in the order I had organized them the night before. I did not mention the conversation with Emmy. I did not mention the dark, or the tree line, or the hour I had spent sitting with a pup on my feet trying to remember what solid ground felt like.

I added three new citation lines to the filing and moved on.

---

I woke once in the early hours to a sound I could not name — not a sound, exactly. A presence. The particular quality of attention that a wolf's territorial instinct generates, close and watchful.

I opened my door.

His wolf filled the corridor. Dark-pelted, enormous, utterly still. Watching the far end of the hallway with the patient, absolute focus of something that had decided it was not moving.

He did not enter. I did not step back.

We looked at each other across the threshold for a long moment — long enough that my wolf went quiet inside me, not wary, just still — and then I closed the door.

In the morning, the cedar branches were on the stone where he had stood. Fresh-cut. The scent was clean and cold and real.

I picked them up and brought them inside. I set them on the windowsill and did not examine why.

I went back to my documents. The tribunal date was coming. I had work to do.