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.