The banquet hall glittered like a trap.

I stood at the entrance in the gown Lucy had approved three weeks ago—midnight blue silk that made my white-jasmine scent seem sharper, colder. The Silverfang Pack's annual banquet. Two hundred wolves in formal dress. Candles everywhere. Music drifting from the string quartet in the corner.

I was late because Cameron had been late sending the car.

I scanned the head table and found my seat. Not at Cameron's right side. Not even at his left. A chair near the end, tucked beside Gamma Lowell's wife, a kind woman who always looked faintly embarrassed on my behalf.

Cleo Powell sat at Cameron's right.

She wore crimson. Her dark hair was pinned up to show her throat—unmarked, but displayed like an invitation. She leaned toward Cameron, laughing at something he'd said, her hand resting on the table close enough to his that their fingers nearly touched.

I walked to my assigned seat. No one spoke. A few she-wolves glanced at me, then away. The Gamma's wife smiled tightly and murmured, "Luna."

"Good evening," I said.

I sat. I folded my hands in my lap. I did not look at the head table again.

The first course arrived. I ate three bites of salmon and set my fork down. My wolf stirred faintly, like something turning over in sleep, then went quiet. She had learned, over three years, not to reach for Cameron's scent. It only hurt when she did.

Halfway through the second course, Cameron stood.

The hall went silent instantly. That was his gift—his Alpha aura filled a room before he even spoke. Pine and thunder. I smelled it from across the hall and felt nothing.

"Thank you all for gathering tonight," Cameron said. His voice carried easily, deep and controlled. "Silverfang has had a strong year. Our borders are secure. Our alliances are stable. And I want to take a moment to recognize someone who has been...instrumental in supporting the pack's social standing."

He turned slightly toward Cleo.

My hands stayed folded in my lap.

"Cleo Powell has shown exceptional dedication," Cameron continued. "Her efforts in organizing pack events and representing Silverfang at regional gatherings have been invaluable. To honor that, I've commissioned a piece to mark her contributions."

He looked directly at me for the first time that evening.

"Luna Astrid," he said, his tone flat and formal, "I'd like you to craft a moonstone pendant for Cleo. Something worthy of her service."

The hall was so quiet I could hear the candles burning.

A moonstone pendant. For another woman's throat. Commissioned by my mate.

Moonstone pendants were sacred. They were cut for marking ceremonies—for mates, for Lunas, for bonds the Moon Goddess herself had blessed. To craft one for anyone else was to strip the ritual of its meaning.

I met Cameron's eyes. His expression was unreadable, but his wolf was there behind it, watching me. Waiting.

He wanted a reaction. Jealousy. Anger. Anything.

I gave him nothing.

"Yes, Alpha," I said.

My voice was quiet and clear. I did not look at Cleo. I did not look at the pack members staring at me with a mix of pity and discomfort.

Cameron's jaw tightened. Just slightly. Just enough that I noticed.

Cleo smiled and touched his arm. "Thank you, Alpha," she said warmly. "I'm honored."

The meal resumed. Conversations started again, tentative at first, then louder. I finished my water. I did not eat another bite.

When the banquet finally ended, I returned to my workshop.

It was a small room off the east wing of the pack house—mine by contract, untouched by anyone else. My cutting table. My tools. My stones. The only space in Silverfang that felt like it belonged to me.

I pulled the design I'd been working on from the drawer. A raw moonstone, pale and flawless, the size of a plum. I set it on the table under the lamp and studied it.

Cleo's pendant.

I could make it technically perfect. I could cut it so precisely that every facet caught the light exactly right, so that when she wore it, wolves would stop and stare. I could make it beautiful enough to hurt.

And it would mean nothing.

I picked up my smallest blade and began.

The first cut was always the hardest—finding the stone's natural fault line, the place where it wanted to split. I ran my thumb along the surface, feeling for the pulse beneath. There. A faint vibration, like a heartbeat.

I pressed the blade in and the stone opened cleanly.

For the next four hours, I worked in silence. My wolf stayed quiet. My hands stayed steady.

When I finally finished, the pendant was flawless. A teardrop shape, perfectly symmetrical, cut to catch light from every angle. It would look stunning against Cleo's throat.

I set it in a velvet box and locked it in the cabinet.

Then I sat at my table, pulled a small rough moonstone from my pocket—a piece I'd kept for myself, uncut and unpolished—and ran my thumb along its edge.

My wolf stirred. Just once. Then went silent again.

I stayed there until dawn, counting the weeks left on my contract.

Seventy-three days.

The vault alarm woke the whole pack house at three in the morning.

I was already awake—I am always awake at three in the morning—so I was dressed and in the corridor before most wolves had found their slippers. Nathaniel Cross reached the vault first, then Cameron, then the rest of the pack spilling down the stairs in robes and confusion. I stood at the back of the crowd, near enough to hear, far enough to be forgotten.

The raw moonstone was gone. The one I'd catalogued myself four months ago—a stone the size of a fist, veined with silver threads so rare I'd written three pages of notes on it alone. I remembered exactly where it had sat on the third shelf, wrapped in blue cloth, logged under my own careful hand.

"The vault wasn't forced," Nathaniel said, holding up the lock. "Whoever took it had a key."

Cleo stood beside Cameron, one hand pressed to her collarbone, her eyes wide with practiced alarm. "Morrison had vault access this week," she said softly, like she hated to say it. "His patrol rotation put him here alone Tuesday night. I only mention it because—" she paused, letting the silence do her work for her, "—because I don't want to believe it either."

I felt something cold settle into my stomach. I knew Morrison's schedule as well as I knew my own. I knew the vault inventory better than anyone alive. I could have told them in five minutes that the shelf tags didn't match Cleo's timeline, that the cloth wrapping was folded wrong for how Morrison always folded things, meticulous and squared, not crumpled the way I'd seen it that morning.

No one asked me.

Cameron's voice cracked through the hall like a whip. "Morrison. Front and center."

The old Beta stepped forward from the crowd, spine straight, face unreadable. He had served three Alphas before Cameron was born. He said nothing.

"Did you take the stone?"

"No, Alpha."

"You had access. You had motive—" Cameron didn't even finish the sentence, didn't say what motive, because there wasn't one, because Cleo had built a house out of nothing but proximity and suspicion and the specific gravity of her own performed grief.

"I want an investigation," Morrison said quietly. "I've served this pack forty years. I'm owed that much."

Cameron's aura rolled out across the hall, pressing down on every wolf in the room, thick as pine smoke, heavy as thunder before it breaks. I felt it against my skin even standing at the back. Morrison's knees buckled under the weight of it—not because he wanted to kneel, but because an Alpha tone at full force doesn't ask.

"You're owed nothing," Cameron said. "You're stripped of your rank, effective now. You have until nightfall to leave Silverfang territory."

The hall was silent except for the low hum of the alarm, still blinking red above the vault door.

Morrison rose. Slowly, with the dignity of a man who had decided, somewhere in that kneeling second, that this was the last thing Silverfang would ever take from him without a fight in his own heart, even if he gave none in his voice.

He walked toward the door. Toward me, because the door was behind where I stood.

As he passed, he paused. Barely a beat. His eyes found mine—not pleading, not asking for anything, just seeing me, the way he always had.

"Luna," he said. A single word. The only time anyone in this pack house had ever said it like it meant something.

He nodded once and walked out into the dark.

Something behind my eyes went out like a snuffed candle.

I stood there while the pack dispersed, while Cleo touched Cameron's arm and murmured something soft about how terrible this must be for everyone, while Cameron gripped the back of his neck and did not look at me once.

I went back to my workshop. I did not cut anything. I sat at my table until the sun rose, and for the first time in three years, I let myself think—clearly, deliberately—about every road out of Silverfang I had ever noticed. The service gate past the eastern tree line. The unmarked trail behind the healer's garden that led to the old logging road. The bus station forty minutes south, the one I'd seen once from a car window and never forgotten.

My wolf did not stir. Not once. She had gone somewhere quiet and I did not go looking for her.

By the end of the week, Nathaniel Cross wore Morrison's old pin on his collar, and my workshop hours had been "restructured" to accommodate Luna duties I hadn't been informed of. Commissions that once came directly to me now passed first through Cleo's new administrative office. The Gamma's wife stopped meeting my eyes in the hallway.

I absorbed it the way I absorbed everything—quietly, precisely, without a flicker on my face.

But the map in my mind kept growing. Every day, another line drawn. Another road remembered.

The council chamber smelled like old wood and pack authority. I stood in the center of the room, hands at my sides, while Cleo sat at the witness table with her arm carefully positioned so everyone could see the scratch.

It was a clean line. Too clean. Self-inflicted scratches always looked like that—deliberate, controlled, not the jagged mess of an actual struggle.

Cameron sat at the head of the council table. He had not looked at me once since I entered the room.

"Luna Astrid attacked me in the east corridor yesterday evening," Cleo said. Her voice trembled just enough. "I don't know what I did to provoke her. I tried to apologize, but she—she just grabbed my arm and—"

She stopped, pressing her fingers to her mouth like the memory was too much.

Two she-wolves from the Powell bloodline sat beside her, nodding along. "We saw it," one of them said. "Luna Astrid seemed...unstable."

I said nothing. There was no point. The scratch existed. The witnesses existed. The story was already written.

Cameron's jaw tightened. He gripped the edge of the table, his knuckles white. "Astrid," he said finally. "Do you have anything to say?"

I met his eyes. Pine and thunder. My wolf did not stir.

"No, Alpha."

His expression flickered—something I could not name passed across his face and vanished. He looked away.

"Confine her to the detention cells," he said. "Pending investigation."

Two guards stepped forward. I did not resist. I walked between them down the stone stairs, through the narrow corridor that smelled like damp earth and old fear, into the cell at the end.

The door locked behind me with a sound like finality.

I sat on the stone bench and waited.

---

They came on the second night.

Four she-wolves, all younger than me, all wearing the particular kind of cruelty that comes from knowing no one will stop you. I recognized two of them from Cleo's social circle. The other two I had never seen before.

The guard at the end of the hall turned his back.

The first blow came from behind—a shove that sent me into the wall hard enough to rattle my teeth. I caught myself and turned, but the second she-wolf was already moving, her fist connecting with my ribs.

I did not fight back. Fighting would give them an excuse to escalate. Fighting would mean Cameron could call it mutual violence and justify whatever came next.

So I curled against the wall and covered my head and let them take what they wanted.

A hand fisted in my hair, yanking my head back. Someone's nails raked down my arm, tearing fabric and skin. A boot caught my shin. Another blow to my ribs, then my back, then my shoulder.

I did not scream. I did not call through the mind-link. I had learned, over three years, that Cameron only heard what he wanted to hear.

My wolf stayed silent. Somewhere deep inside, she had gone to a place I could not follow.

Eventually they stopped. One of them spat on the floor near my head. "That's what happens when you forget your place, Luna."

They left. The guard returned to his post. The cell door stayed locked.

I lay on the stone floor and counted my breaths. In. Out. In. Out. My lip was split. My left eye was swelling shut. My ribs screamed every time I inhaled.

I did not cry.

I stayed there through the night, watching the thin line of moonlight move across the floor, and for the first time in three years, I let myself think clearly about the one thing I had been avoiding:

I was going to leave Silverfang.

Not in seven weeks. Not when the contract ended. The moment I could walk, the moment I could move without breaking, I was going to vanish.

The map in my mind sharpened. The eastern service gate. The herb groves past the training grounds. The Omega night nurse in the healer's ward who had once told me, very quietly, that she thought I deserved better.

I ran my thumb along the rough moonstone in my pocket—the one I had carried every day since Morrison's banishment—and felt its faint pulse beneath my fingers.

Seven weeks was too long to wait.

---

Cameron came for me on the third morning.

I heard his footsteps before I saw him—heavy, controlled, moving with the particular authority of an Alpha who has made a decision and will not be questioned. The cell door opened.

He stood in the threshold, backlit by the corridor lamps, and for a long moment he just stared.

I was still on the floor. I had tried to stand an hour ago and my ribs had informed me, very clearly, that standing was not currently possible. My face was a mess. I could feel the swelling, the crusted blood at my lip, the bruise spreading across my cheekbone.

Cameron's wolf surged. I felt it through the bond—a visceral, roaring fury that nearly forced his shift. His eyes flashed gold. His hands clenched into fists.

Then he clamped it down. Buried it. His expression went flat.

"Get up," he said.

I pushed myself upright. Slowly. Every movement cost me. I did not ask for help.

He watched me struggle to my feet and said nothing.

We walked to the pack vehicle in silence. He opened the passenger door. I climbed in, moving carefully so my ribs would not scream louder than they already were.

The drive back to the pack house took twenty minutes.

Cameron did not speak to me. Not once. Instead, I felt the mind-link open—not to me, but past me, around me, to someone else. To Cleo.

I could not hear the words, but I could sense the shape of it. Comfort. Reassurance. The particular warmth of his attention flowing toward her while I sat beside him, bleeding.

I turned my head and looked out the window. Watched the trees pass. Counted the miles.

My wolf did not stir. She had gone somewhere I could not reach her, and I was grateful for it.

When we reached the pack house, Cameron finally spoke.

"Cleo suggested you've probably learned your lesson," he said. His tone was flat. "Don't make me regret bringing you back."

I nodded once. I did not trust my voice.

I walked into the pack house alone. Up the stairs. Into my workshop. I locked the door behind me and sat at my cutting table.

My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against the wood until they stopped.

Then I pulled out a blank sheet of paper and began to write.

Patrol schedules. Guard rotations. The names of every Omega who had ever looked at me with something other than fear. The location of the wild sage grove past the western border, the one whose scent could mask a wolf's trail for miles.

I wrote until my hand cramped. Until the sun set. Until the pack house went quiet around me.

Seven weeks was too long.

But I would honor the contract. I would finish what I had agreed to finish. And then I would walk out of Silverfang territory and never look back.

I ran my thumb along the rough moonstone one more time, feeling its heartbeat pulse against my skin.

Seventy-three days had become a countdown I could survive.

Fifty-one days, I corrected myself.

Fifty-one days, and I would be free.