The sound of clinking glasses and raucous laughter drifted up from the banquet hall below. Down there, the Ironveil Pack was celebrating a fated union. They were drinking expensive wine to toast their Alpha and his shining new Luna.

Up here, the back stairwell was cold and narrow.

I took the steps one by one, keeping one hand against the wall. The rejection vow still throbbed behind my ribs like an open, seared wound. My fingertips still tingled from that split second of terrifying, impossible heat at the mahogany table.

"Going somewhere, little sister?"

The voice was soft, but the sweetness was completely gone.

I froze on the third-floor landing.

Bethany stepped out from the shadows near the linen closet. She had already kicked off her heels. In the dim yellow light of the wall sconce, her red gown looked dark, like drying blood. There was no trace of the trembling, delicate maiden who had wept in Harrison’s arms ten minutes ago.

Her lips were curved into a flat, cruel line.

"I was going to pack," I said, my voice hoarse.

"Pack?" Bethany laughed, a short, dry snap. She closed the distance between us, her bare feet silent on the cold stone. "You really think you get to just walk away with your chin up? Like you're still someone?"

"Harrison rejected me," I said, forcing my spine straight. "You got what you wanted. What else is there?"

"What else?" Bethany stepped closer, crowding me back until my shoulder blades hit the rough plaster. Her eyes glittered with venom. "You existed, Estrella. That’s what else. For twenty-one years, I had to share a roof with you. The broken bloodline. The pathetic, wolfless freak who somehow still got to dance under the full moon while everyone watched. And then you dared to walk into Harrison’s office and offer him a contract."

She tilted her head, looking me up and down with raw disgust.

"You sat in my chair," she whispered viciously. "You breathed his air. You carried his title. It was wasted on you. All of it. The noble bloodline, the Luna seat, his regard—it belongs to me. It always did."

"You stole the scent," I rasped, the truth clawing up my throat. "I smelled it on you. You took it from my—"

"Shut up."

Her hand shot out, shockingly fast. Her wolf’s strength pinned my shoulders against the wall so hard the back of my skull cracked against the stone.

Before I could draw breath to scream, her other hand came out of the folds of her dress.

Between her manicured fingers sat a small glass vial filled with a thick, violet liquid that gave off a sharp, metallic reek.

Concentrated wolfsbane.

My stomach plummeted into icy terror. "Bethany, no—"

"You're not dancing anymore, Estrella," she snarled. "And you're never going to get in my way again."

She jammed her thumb into the pressure point beneath my jaw. My mouth reflexively gasped open in agony. In that split second, she shoved the glass rim between my teeth and tipped it back.

The poison poured down my throat.

It felt like swallowing crushed glass and liquid fire.

The heat didn't just burn my esophagus—it surged straight into my blood, boiling hot, black, and toxic. It raced through my veins, screaming toward the deep vault in my soul where that wild, newborn wolf had just begun to stir.

*No!*

A silent, agonized shriek echoed in my mind. The wolfsbane slammed into the fragile thread connecting me to my wolf. I felt it snap. It didn't just tear—it shattered like frozen crystal, plunging my inner world into pitch-black, suffocating darkness.

Bethany let go.

I collapsed onto the stone landing, my body violently convulsing. Thick, burning bile rose in my throat, spilling past my lips. My hands clawed at the cold floor, fingernails tearing against the stone as spasms ripped through my spine. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't scream. My limbs jerked helplessly.

Bethany stood over me, looking down at my writhing body as if I were a cockroach dying in the dust.

Absently, she reached up and touched her own copper-furred wrist once—a small, nervous tell. Then she turned and walked toward the stairs, smoothing her crimson dress.

"Help!" her voice suddenly shrieked, instantly morphing into panicked, weeping terror. "Harrison! Someone help me! Please!"

Footsteps thundered up the stairwell. Heavy, frantic, lethal.

Harrison rounded the landing, his Alpha aura rolling off him in suffocating waves. His eyes were wide, scouring the dim space until they found Bethany huddled against the banister.

"Bethany! What happened?"

"She... she cornered me!" Bethany sobbed, pointing a trembling hand at me. Tears streamed down her cheeks with flawless precision. "Estrella attacked me! She said if she couldn't have you, neither could I! I had to push her off—she took something, Harrison, she swallowed something to hurt herself!"

Harrison’s dark eyes whipped toward the floor.

I lay there, shivering uncontrollably, my vision blurring in and out of darkness. The violet tang of wolfsbane burned on my lips and chin. I tried to speak. I tried to tell him that she had forced it down my throat, that she had poisoned me.

All that came out was a wet, shuddering gasp.

Harrison stepped toward me. His nostrils flared, scenting the sharp, unmistakable stench of wolfsbane. A dark, terrifying disgust settled over his features. He didn't bend down. He didn't touch my pulse. He looked at me the way an executioner looks at a condemned criminal.

He had made his choice. He believed her. He would always believe her.

"Enough," Harrison said, his voice cold as a winter grave.

Daniel Mercer, his Beta, appeared on the stairs behind him, breathing hard.

Harrison didn't look back. "Strip her of her ceremonial titles. She will never dance for this pack again."

"Alpha?" Daniel asked, hesitating for half a second as he took in my convulsing form.

"She is a danger to the Luna and to herself," Harrison ordered, his Alpha tone slamming down, absolute and merciless. "Lock her in the Omega basement quarters. Indefinitely. No visitors. No medical staff unless she stops breathing."

"Understood," Daniel said quietly.

Harrison turned his back on me. He wrapped a protective arm around Bethany’s waist, whispering soft reassurances against her copper hair as he guided her up the stairs. Up toward the third floor. Toward the lavish Luna suite that had been prepared for her.

I watched their shadows disappear around the corner of the landing.

Daniel crouched beside me. He didn't speak. He reached down, grabbed me roughly by the upper arms, and hauled my convulsing body off the cold floor. My heels dragged uselessly against the stone as he pulled me down the stairs, deeper and deeper into the dark belly of the pack house.

Down past the banquet hall. Past the music. Past the light.

He dragged me into the damp, windowless corridor of the Omega cells, unlocked a heavy iron door, and dumped me onto the thin cot inside.

The lock clicked shut with a heavy, final clatter.

The room was pitch black. The stone walls smelled of mildew and cold dirt.

Above my head, three floors up in the very same building, Bethany was walking into the Luna suite, surrounded by silk sheets, cedar scents, and total adoration.

Down here, the poison burned through my silent veins.

I curled into a ball on the hard cot, pressing a shaking hand against my ribs. Deep inside, the bond was gone. The connection was dark. But somewhere beneath the ash of the wolfsbane, an ember remained—buried so deep no poison could ever touch it.

And in the dark, that ember began to smoke.

I sat on the edge of the cot and reached inward.

I looked for the fragile, newborn heat that had sparked beneath my ribs at the banquet table.

There was nothing.

The wolfsbane had scorched the earth. Where that ancient, wild presence had briefly stirred, there was only cold, dead stone. Total, hollow silence.

I rested my back against the damp brick wall and pulled my knees to my chest. In my head, I began to dance.

*Step left, pivot on the ball of the right foot, arch the spine, arms out.*

It was the ceremonial wolf-dance of the winter solstice. I ran through the third sequence, then the fourth. I had practiced these steps in empty studios until my shins bled, using the choreography to calm my racing heart whenever the pack made me feel invisible.

Then I tried to point my right toe. A jagged, searing pain shot up my calf. The poison had burned through my nerve endings. My left shoulder twitched with an involuntary spasm. My breath caught, raw and wet, in my blistered throat.

The dance was gone, too.

I leaned my head back against the brick and made a mental list.

My birth rank: gone.

My contracted title: gone.

The fated bond: shredded.

My inner wolf: severed.

My dance: ruined.

I catalogued every loss, one by one, with clinical detachment. I kept my breathing slow and even. I did not cry. Crying was a luxury for wolves who had someone coming to comfort them.

The heavy iron door rattled at dusk.

A guard shoved a wooden bucket and a mop into the cell. Behind him walked Petra, a low-ranked pack laborer who helped oversee the cleaning details. Three years ago, she had caught me shivering on a freezing studio floor after a nine-hour rehearsal and slipped me a mug of hot broth without asking for anything in return.

She set a basin of lye water down. Her eyes darted toward the guard standing out in the hallway.

"Head down," she whispered, her voice barely a breath.

She reached into the pocket of her coarse apron, grabbed my cold hand, and pressed something small and hard into my palm. A cheap, burner flip-phone.

"The guard rotates at midnight," Petra murmured. "Be careful, Estrella."

Before I could answer, she pulled her hands back, picked up an empty pail, and hurried out. The iron door clanged shut.

I waited until the corridor fell completely silent. At midnight, huddled under the thin, scratchy cot blanket, I dialed a number I had memorized as a child.

The line rang twice.

"Hello?" Nadine’s voice was raspy from sleep, but sharp.

"Grandma," I whispered. My throat scraped against the words.

There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end. "Estrella? What happened to your voice? Where are you?"

"The Ironveil Omega cells," I said flatly. "Harrison rejected me for Bethany. Bethany forced concentrated wolfsbane down my throat. They’ve locked me away."

"Dear Goddess," Nadine breathed. Her voice trembled, but only for a fraction of a second before hardening into pure iron. "Edmund! Get up! Edmund, it's Estrella."

I heard muffled shouts, a drawer opening, the rustle of papers. My grandfather’s voice rumbled in the background, steady and furious.

"We are coming," Nadine said into the receiver. "Edmund is calling his old border contacts right now. We have friends along the northern ridge who owe us favors. We will get you across the sovereign line into the Pacific Northwest."

"I can't leave yet," I said.

"Estrella, they will kill you in there—"

"I need one thing first," I interrupted, my hoarse voice steady. "The Lycan Council emissary arrives in three days for the formal Mate Ceremony. Before you come for me, Grandma... I need you to find everything you can on the Luna Accord."

Silence stretched over the line.

"The ancient tribunal pact?" Nadine asked, a chill in her tone. "Estrella, invoking the Accord carries death if the charge fails."

"It won't fail," I whispered. "Find it."

The next morning, the heavy iron bolt on my cell door screeched back.

Daniel Mercer stepped inside. Harrison's Beta looked down at me, his face impassive. "Get up. The Alpha wants you in the main hall."

He didn't give me time to fix my hair or brush the dirt from my threadbare Omega shift. He gripped my upper arm, his Delta-level strength bruising my skin, and dragged me up the spiral stone stairs.

The heavy doors to the grand pack hall opened.

Every ranked wolf in the Ironveil territory was assembled. Elders sat in the carved gallery above. Warriors lined the walls, standing at attention. In the center of the dais stood Bethany, glowing in a cream-colored silk dress, her manicured hand resting lightly on the pommel of a ceremonial dagger. Her copper wolf's scent was masked by that sickening, stolen perfume.

And beside her stood Harrison.

His dark cedar-and-iron scent hit me across the room, striking the raw, scarred flesh inside my chest like a whip. He wore his full Alpha leathers, towering and untouchable.

Daniel shoved me into the center of the hall. My bare feet slapped against the cold marble. I stumbled, but I caught my balance before my knees could touch the stone.

The hall was dead quiet. Dozens of eyes stared at my sunken cheeks, my tangled hair, and the dark purple bruises blooming around my neck from the wolfsbane convulsions.

Harrison stepped to the edge of the dais. He looked down at me, his jaw set in a rigid, unforgiving line.

"You disrupted the peace of this pack," Harrison said. His voice echoed off the vaulted rafters. "You attacked the future Luna. You took poison to fabricate an assault and shame this house."

I didn't answer. I kept my chin level.

"This is your final clemency, Estrella," he continued, cold and deliberate. "Kneel before Bethany. Drop your head to the marble and speak the vow of submission to your rightful Luna."

"And if I don't?" My hoarse voice carried through the silent hall, quiet but entirely unbroken.

Harrison took a slow step down from the dais. His gaze hardened. "If you refuse, I will open a forced mind-link right now. I will rip open your mind and broadcast every private memory from our mating nights to every warrior and elder in this room. You will have no dignity left."

He unleashed his full Alpha aura.

The air pressure plummeted. A suffocating, crushing weight slammed through the room. Along the walls, strong Delta warriors dropped to their knees, bowing their heads under the absolute, suffocating authority of their Alpha. Even Carl and Virginia lowered their eyes in the gallery.

I stood in the center of the room. Emaciated. Wolfless. Poisoned.

I looked straight into the eyes of the man I had silently loved for a year, the man who had traded me for a ghost of my own scent.

My spine locked straight. My knees didn't bend an inch.

"No," I said.

Harrison’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle jumped beneath his skin.

His pupils contracted into slits, and his eyes flashed a violent, blinding gold. He raised his right hand, his fingers curling like claws as he tore open the mental barrier and reached for my mind.