The bond went cold at 7:02, right as I stepped through the pack hall doors with the painting wrapped in brown paper against my ribs.

I'd expected candles. Maybe the two of us on the porch, the way it used to be before the wedding, before the mark, before a year of watching him turn into someone I had to guess at. Instead I found the entire pack packed shoulder to shoulder under torchlight, and Eiden standing on the dais in the black-and-silver regalia he only wore for formal rites. Ivy Langford stood at his right shoulder, a leather ledger open in her hands like a hymnal.

No one said happy anniversary. No one looked at me at all.

"Tonight," Eiden said, his voice carrying without effort, "Ironveil adopts the Proving Protocol."

I stood in the doorway with my painting and did not understand the words yet. I understood the tone underneath them — flat, official, a voice I hadn't heard him use on me since the day he'd claimed me at the border gathering, cedar and iron rolling off him then like a promise instead of a verdict.

"Every act performed by the Luna in service to this pack will be recorded, scored, and ranked," he went on. "Standards will be public. Consequences will be applied consistently." He did not once glance toward me. "Ivy Langford will administer the system."

Ivy inclined her head, composed, pen already uncapped.

Something moved under my sternum — small, sharp, unfamiliar. I pressed my free hand flat against my chest without meaning to.

"Emelia." Eiden said my name and it dropped straight through the mark on my neck like a stone through water. "Step forward. Accept the terms."

I did not decide to move. My feet decided. That was the horror of it — not that he commanded me, but that my own body answered before my mind had finished screaming *no*. My spine bent. My chin dropped. In front of two hundred wolves who had watched me marked a year ago as something precious, I bowed like livestock accepting a brand.

Ivy's pen scratched against the ledger. "Terms accepted, witnessed, dated," she said, pleasant as a receptionist.

The painting stayed wrapped against my ribs the whole time. I never gave it to him.

---

I don't remember walking out. I remember the corridor — empty, cold stone, pack members filing past me toward the exits without meeting my eyes, the way you don't look at something you feel guilty about. And I remember the fist.

That's the only way I can describe it. Something inside my chest slammed against a wall I hadn't known was there, once, hard, like a knuckle cracking against stone. Then it went still again. I stood alone in the corridor with my back against the wall, breathing like I'd run a mile, waiting for it to happen again.

It didn't.

I pressed my palm flat over my sternum and counted brushstrokes in my head — the way I used to when I was small and my father's silences got too loud. *One. Two. Three.* By eleven the shaking stopped. I rewrapped the painting, tucked the twine tighter, and carried it back to our quarters instead of leaving it on his desk like I'd planned. He hadn't looked at it once tonight. He wasn't going to look at it tomorrow, either.

---

The first weekly score went up on the pack hall board three days later, my name in Ivy's careful handwriting beside a number so low that two omegas near the bulletin board actually flinched on my behalf. Above mine, Ivy's own inaugural score sat at the top of the board, annotated in Eiden's hand: *exemplary baseline.*

I stood reading the criteria sheet pinned beside my score for a long time. Two of the categories I'd been marked down on — *emotional labor efficiency*, *unscheduled task deviation* — weren't listed anywhere on Ivy's sheet at all. Same board. Different rules, quietly, for two different women.

I didn't say anything. I went back to my room, took out the small notebook I'd started keeping under my mattress, and wrote the date, the discrepancy, the exact wording of both sheets, word for word.

The next morning I caught Ivy in the corridor outside the healer's wing, her arms full of files, her smile already arranged.

"I'd like to review the scoring criteria before next week's assessment," I said, keeping my voice even, pleasant. "So I can better align my contributions."

"Of course." She handed me a folded copy without hesitation, gracious as a woman with nothing to hide. "Though you should know the criteria are subject to administrative revision at any time."

"I understand," I said.

I carried the sheet back to my room and set it beside the notebook. I didn't know yet what I was building. I only knew my hands, for the first time in three days, had stopped shaking — and that somewhere behind my ribs, something had woken up enough to notice the difference.

The fever came on fast, the way storms do at the end of summer — clear sky, then everything at once. By noon I couldn't hold a teacup without my hand shaking. By three, Marla had her palm against my forehead and was swearing under her breath.

"A hundred and three," she said. "You're not leaving this bed."

I didn't argue. My skull felt packed with wet sand, and every time I closed my eyes the room tilted sideways. Marla sent word to the pack house herself — *Luna unwell, unable to attend evening rotation, healer's orders* — and for a few hours I let myself believe that would be enough. I lay under the blanket and watched the ceiling swim and thought, stupidly, that maybe this was the one thing the Protocol couldn't touch. A body actually breaking down wasn't a category on Ivy's sheet.

The hook hit at six-forty.

That's the only word I have for it. Not a thought, not a feeling — a hook, buried somewhere behind my collarbone, and then a pull so absolute my spine answered before my brain caught up. *Emelia. You're needed.* Eiden's voice, flat and administrative, dropped through the bond like it had every right to be there. My legs swung off the bed on their own.

"Emelia." Marla grabbed my arm, hard. "Emelia, look at me. You have a fever of a hundred and three. You are not walking anywhere."

"I know," I said. My voice came out strange, distant, like it belonged to someone standing behind me. "I know that."

I stood up anyway. My knees didn't buckle. My feet found the floor and then the door and then the corridor, and the whole time some small, clear part of me was screaming *stop, stop, this is wrong* while the rest of me got dressed and walked out into the rain like it was any other Tuesday.

---

I don't remember most of the walk. I remember the rain soaking through my coat by the second minute, cold enough to feel like something solid pressing down on my skin. I remember reaching the pack hall with my teeth chattering, my vision doubling at the edges, and taking my place at Eiden's left shoulder exactly where the Protocol schedule said I should stand.

He didn't look at me. Not once, in two hours. He ran through territory reports and warrior rotations and a dispute over grazing rights in the flat, even voice he used for everything now, and I stood beside him soaked and burning, answering when spoken to, nodding when required, my whole body a held breath. Somewhere around the ninety-minute mark the room started to swim in earnest. I locked my knees and stared at a point on the far wall and counted — *one, two, three* — until the numbers gave me somewhere to be that wasn't my own skin.

When the assembly finally broke, Eiden turned to the board Ivy kept propped near the dais and marked my score himself. I watched him do it. *Demerit — inefficiency in response time.*

"Two hours and eleven minutes between summons and arrival," he said, to the room, not to me. "Acceptable window is twenty."

No one asked why. No one mentioned the fever, or the rain still dripping off my hair onto the stone floor. Ivy, three feet away, was already reading her own evening's tally aloud — a training regimen report, formatted, cross-referenced, delivered a full day early. *Exemplary. Top marks.* Somebody near the back murmured something admiring. I swayed on my feet and nobody caught me, because nobody was looking.

I made it back to our quarters before I threw up, and then I kept throwing up long after there was anything left to bring up, my knees against the cold tile, my wolf slamming once, hard, against my ribs — a furious, wordless blow — before going quiet again.

---

By morning the fever had broken into something manageable, and I sat up in bed with the Protocol document spread across my knees, reading it the way I hadn't let myself read it before. Not for compliance. For architecture.

Three categories overlapped in language vague enough to be interpreted two ways — *responsiveness*, *initiative*, *resource stewardship* — and when I laid Ivy's last six scores beside the criteria sheet, I found a pattern: adjustments made after the fact, always upward, always for work already turned in. I wrote it all down. Then I found one clean example, dated, sourced, and I carried it to Eiden's study myself.

"I only want clarification," I said, setting the page on his desk. "This entry was revised two days after submission, in Ivy's favor, under a category that isn't defined anywhere in the document."

He read it for exactly as long as it took to dismiss it. "Perception bias," he said, and picked up his pen. "Noted. Demerit — challenging administrative process."

I didn't argue. I went back to my room and wrote it down — the discrepancy, his dismissal, the new demerit — in the notebook under my mattress.

Then I opened a second ledger, one Ivy would never see, and wrote it all down again.

It started with a chair.

Not my chair — I didn't own furniture, not really, not under the Protocol — but the seat at Eiden's right hand at the long table, the one I'd occupied every meal for a year. On the fourth morning after the fever, I came down to find Ivy already in it, a folder open beside her plate, her voice low and efficient as she walked Eiden through the week's grazing disputes.

"Luna Emelia's score dipped below the correspondence threshold," she said, not looking up. "I've been handling the border pack's letters in her stead. Standard procedure, per section four."

Eiden nodded like she'd told him the weather.

I took the seat across from them instead, and nobody said anything, and that was somehow worse than if they had.

It kept happening. Ivy at the border patrol briefing, standing where I used to stand, citing Protocol clause after Protocol clause like scripture. Ivy answering Luna correspondence "on my behalf," her handwriting looping through letters meant for my hand. Every time, she framed it the same way — helpful, procedural, temporary, always temporary — and every time, the pack absorbed it a little more, until wolves who used to nod to me in the hallway started nodding to her first, out of habit, out of whatever animal logic tells a body which way the wind has turned.

I watched the scoreboard do the same thing in numbers. Her line climbed. Mine dropped. I stood in front of it one evening with my notebook against my chest and did math I didn't want to be doing — which tasks she'd claimed, which ones I could still take back, which ones weren't worth the fight. I was still doing that math when the runner found me.

"Luna Emelia." He was young, out of breath, rain still beading on his jacket. "Border patrol found your father. East ridge. He's — Luna, you should come."

I don't remember the run to the healer's station. I remember arriving.

My father was on the table, grey as ash, his whole body seizing in short, violent pulses, foam at the corner of his mouth. Marla had both hands pressed to his chest, murmuring something low and fast, a healer's litany, sweat sliding down her temple.

"Wolfsbane," she said, without looking up. "Someone got it into him deep. I can slow it. I can't stop it. Not with what I'm authorized to use."

"What do you need?"

"The antidote. The real one. It's restricted — Alpha sign-off, always, for anyone who isn't pack." Her eyes found mine, and I understood the rest before she said it. "He's a rogue, Emelia."

I was in Eiden's study within the minute, my father's blood still on my hands from where I'd gripped the table edge.

"He's dying," I said. "Marla says the antidote can save him. I need your authorization."

Eiden listened. He actually listened, all the way through, his face arranged into something that might have passed for attention if I hadn't known him for a year. Then he set down his pen.

"Darwin Rogers holds no pack status," he said. "The Protocol doesn't extend resource allocation to non-members. I can't authorize an exception without precedent, and precedent isn't something I set on request."

"He's my father."

"I understand the relationship." Same voice. Same terrible, level voice. "It doesn't change the classification."

I didn't scream. I want to say I did, that some part of me finally broke loud instead of quiet, but I didn't. I turned and walked out, and somewhere behind me I heard the scratch of Ivy's pen updating the board before I'd even reached the door — *emotional escalation, unauthorized office visit, demerit* — my score falling while my father seized on a table two hallways away.

Three days. He fought for three days without the one thing that could have ended it cleanly, Marla rationing whatever she was allowed, my score dropping lower with every hour I spent at his bedside instead of at Eiden's.

On the third night, Eiden called the pack.

I stood at the base of the dais in the same spot I'd stood a year ago to be marked, and Eiden's voice carried over two hundred silent wolves without effort.

"Luna Emelia has failed to meet the minimum threshold for continued standing," he said. "Ivy Langford will serve as Proxy Luna, effective immediately, assuming all mate-adjacent duties."

Ivy stepped up beside him. Composed. Already home in the space.

Then Eiden looked at me for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, and his voice dropped into the register that lived under my mark like a hook waiting in dark water.

"Kneel."

My knees hit the stone before I understood the word had landed. I felt every fiber of myself scream against it and watched my own body obey anyway, bowed low before Ivy, before the pack, before him, the cold floor biting through my skirt.

And somewhere under my ribs, something old — older than the bond, older than his voice, older than the year I'd spent bending — cracked clean down the middle.

Something silver stirred beneath the fracture.

Then it went still.