Three days.

That was how long it took me to stop shaking every time I heard footsteps in the corridor. Not because the shaking stopped—the silver in my blood made sure of that—but because I taught myself to hold it inside my chest instead of letting it show in my hands.

The wheelchair squeaked on the servants' quarters floor. Someone had given me the oldest one they could find, one wheel wobbling, the leather cracked. Winifred's idea of humor, probably. I rolled myself to the narrow window and looked out at the pack house grounds I used to walk every morning, checking the wards, greeting the warriors on patrol. My hands remembered the shape of every stone in that path.

My hands remembered other things too.

Camera rotation, north corridor: forty seconds facing east, twenty seconds facing the stairwell, four seconds of blind arc as the mount reset. Lower corridor terminal: patrol pass at 2:47, next pass at 3:14. Twenty-seven minutes. My old Luna credentials had access to every terminal in this building, and Emmett had been so busy carving me out of his life he had forgotten to carve me out of the system.

People who think you're finished stop locking doors.

I closed my eyes and let the map settle behind them, clean and quiet, the way I used to arrange training rosters in my head. It wasn't hope. Hope was a thing I had already buried on a banquet hall floor. This was something colder and steadier. This was work.

—

Sophie found me before breakfast.

She swept into the great hall trailed by half a dozen mid-ranked wolves, my Luna pendant catching the light against her throat. She had learned to walk with it already, hip forward, chin high, the way I never had. I was in the doorway with a bucket at my feet, waiting for someone to tell me what an Omega was allowed to do next.

"There she is." Her voice was warm the way honey is warm—thick, sticky, everywhere at once. "Poor thing, sitting in the hallway like she doesn't know what to do with herself."

The wolves behind her tittered. One of them, a Delta named Cora who used to bring me tea during ward inspections, smiled at the floor.

Sophie crouched in front of my wheelchair. Not close enough to touch. Close enough to be seen crouching.

"The hall floor," she said, still warm, still smiling. "Every morning, before the pack rises. On your hands and knees, please. The Omega should keep herself useful."

She let the word Omega hang.

I looked at her pendant. The chain had been sized for my neck; it sat higher on hers, tight in the hollow of her collarbone. She saw me looking and touched it, deliberate, two fingers laid flat over the silver.

"Yes, Luna," I said.

My voice came out even. That surprised me a little. Sophie's smile tightened at the corners, just for a second—she had wanted a flinch, and I hadn't given her one. She rose and swept out of the hall, her wolves trailing after her like a hem.

I lowered myself out of the chair onto the stone. My knees hit the floor Emmett had spoken the rejection over. Same tile. Same crack where the wine had gone. I could still see the faint discoloration, three feet from my left hand, where they hadn't quite scrubbed the blood out.

I dipped the rag in the bucket and began.

Footsteps came down the corridor and stopped at the entrance. I didn't look up. I knew the weight of Reid Calloway's boots the way I knew every stone in the ward path. I heard him breathe in—once, sharp—and then his boots turned and walked away.

I kept scrubbing. The water in the bucket went pink.

—

At 2:51 in the morning, I rolled myself out of the servants' quarters with my hands wrapped in a strip of blanket to muffle the wheels.

The corridor was empty. The patrol had passed four minutes ago. I counted the camera arc in my head—forty east, twenty stairwell, four blind—and moved through the blind on the fourth count.

The terminal blinked awake under my fingers. My old credentials held. My hands shook, silver-shake, not fear-shake, and I flattened them on the desk until they stopped enough to type.

Medical wing. Night of the banquet. Camera three.

The file loaded.

I watched myself on the screen, sedated on the cot, my neck already bandaged. I watched Emmett walk in without hurrying. I watched Marcus's shoulders draw up around his ears.

"Directly into the mark site," Emmett said, from the speaker, in the same clipped voice I had heard through the fog. "Then the wolfsbane, twice daily. I want her wolf dormant. Permanently."

Unhurried. Clinical. Preserved.

I copied the file to the drive I had hidden inside a maintenance manual three shelves down in the utility closet—a manual so dusty the last signature on it was mine, from two years ago, when I still cared about maintaining the boilers. No one had opened it since.

I logged out. Wiped the terminal history. Rolled back through the blind on the four-count.

In the servants' quarters, I lay down on the cot and pressed two fingers to the cold place on my neck where my mark used to live. Nothing answered. My wolf was still under, still silent, still buried under whatever Marcus had put into me.

But somewhere far below all of that, in the dark, something had begun to keep score.

I slept.

Sophie came to my door on the fourth morning with a tray in her hands and a smile that didn't reach past her teeth.

"Breakfast," she said, setting it on the narrow table beside the cot. "Marcus says you need to keep your strength up. Medicinal protocol for unstable she-wolves."

She said it like she was doing me a kindness. Like the words medicinal protocol weren't just another way of saying poison.

I looked at the tray. Porridge, pale and thin. A cup of something herbal that smelled wrong—not bitter the way wolfsbane was bitter, but close enough that my body recognized it before my mind did. My stomach turned over.

"Thank you, Luna," I said.

Sophie's smile sharpened. She liked that word in my mouth. She let it sit there a moment before she turned and walked out, her heels clicking down the corridor with the confidence of someone who believed she had already won.

I waited until the sound faded. Then I poured the tea into the crack between the floorboards and scraped the porridge into the cloth I kept folded under the cot. I would bury it later, in the narrow strip of dirt behind the servants' quarters where no one bothered to look.

My hands shook. Not fear. Silver. Always silver now, a fine tremor that lived in my bones and never quite stopped. I pressed my palms flat against my thighs and counted my breaths until the shaking eased enough to think.

Marcus came at noon with the twice-daily dose Emmett had ordered. He didn't meet my eyes. He never did anymore. He pressed the needle into my arm, depressed the plunger, and withdrew without a word. But as he turned to leave, I saw him glance at the tray on the table—the empty cup, the untouched porridge—and something flickered across his face. Not guilt. Not quite. Something closer to calculation.

He left. I listened to his footsteps retreat down the corridor, then fade entirely. I closed my eyes and added it to the list in my head: additional suppression, administered through food, bypassing Marcus's direct oversight. Sophie's doing. Had to be.

I would need proof.

—

The terminal blinked awake at 2:53 in the morning, the screen casting a pale glow across my hands. My credentials held. They always held. Emmett had stripped me of everything that mattered and forgotten to strip me of the one thing that didn't: access.

I pulled up the financial records first. Pack discretionary account, controlled by the Luna. Sophie's account now. Three transfers over two weeks, each one routed to an external supplier I didn't recognize. The amounts were small enough not to trigger an audit but large enough to procure concentrated tinctures in bulk.

I copied the files. My hands didn't shake. Not here. Not when I was working.

Then I pulled the banquet hall footage.

I had avoided it the first night. I told myself I didn't need it, that the medical wing recording was enough. But I was lying to myself, and I knew it. I needed to see it. Not for evidence. For something else. Something I couldn't name.

The file loaded. The timestamp read 8:47. I watched myself lift the glass. I watched the wine hit my tongue, watched my face change—confusion first, then pain, then nothing as my legs gave out. I watched the glass shatter. I watched the blood spread.

And I watched Emmett.

He was twenty feet away, his hand resting at the small of Sophie's back. He didn't move. Not when I fell. Not when Vera screamed. Not when the pack healer ran forward and the warriors began shouting for space. He stood there, his hand on Sophie's back, and watched me bleed out our pup on the floor he had made me scrub three days later.

I watched it twice. Then I transferred the file and logged out.

In the servants' quarters, I lay on the cot and pressed two fingers to the cold place on my neck. My wolf was still silent. Still buried. But somewhere deeper than that, in a place the wolfsbane couldn't reach, something was keeping a ledger. Every dose. Every lie. Every moment he chose to stand still.

I would give it all back to him. Not in rage. Not in chaos. In a single, unbreakable testimony.

—

The letter arrived in the morning, delivered to Emmett's Beta by a Silverfang runner who didn't stay for a reply.

I was scrubbing the great hall floor when the Beta carried it past me, his face tight. I kept my head down and my hands moving, but I listened. Wolves always talked louder than they thought they did.

"Silverfang's pulling out," the Beta said, his voice low and clipped. "Vera Holt. Formal withdrawal. She cited concerns about pack stability and the treatment of ranked wolves at the banquet."

There was a long silence. Then Emmett's voice, cold and flat: "She was always looking for a reason."

"She saw Lena collapse," the Beta said quietly. "She was standing three feet away."

Another silence. Longer this time.

"Burn it," Emmett said.

I heard the crumple of paper. I heard footsteps retreat toward the hearth. I kept scrubbing.

That evening, Emmett paused in the doorway of the Luna suite—Sophie's suite now, redecorated in pale blues and silvers, every trace of me erased. I was passing in the corridor with the mop bucket, invisible the way Omegas were supposed to be invisible. He didn't see me. He was looking at the room, breathing in.

His face changed. Just for a second. Something confused. Something almost pained.

He inhaled again, deeper this time, and his jaw tightened. Then he stepped inside and closed the door.

I stood in the corridor with the mop in my hands and the ghost of wild honeysuckle clinging to the air between us—a scent that shouldn't have been there, a scent that was mine, that the bond had burned into his wolf's memory and wouldn't let go no matter how many times he told himself it was gone.

I turned and walked back to the servants' quarters.

Behind me, through the closed door, I heard Sophie's voice rise, sharp and demanding. I heard Emmett's reply, low and tired. I didn't stay to listen.

I had work to do.

Sophie found me in the courtyard at mid-morning, when the sun was high enough to cast sharp shadows and six warriors were gathered near the training posts, waiting for Emmett to brief them on border patrol rotations.

I had a serving tray in my hands. Tea service for the Luna suite. The same route I walked every morning now, invisible as furniture, my wheelchair left behind because Sophie preferred her Omega upright and useful.

She came across the stones with her forearm held out like an offering, four parallel scratches running from wrist to elbow, red and deliberate. Her voice carried before she reached me.

"That animal you've been feeding," she said, breathless and warm with distress. "It attacked me. I was only trying to move it off pack property, and it lunged."

I looked at the scratches. Too even. Too shallow. The kind of marks you make when you drag your own nails down your own skin, controlled and careful.

I said nothing.

Emmett turned from the warriors, his jaw already tight with irritation. He didn't want this disruption. Didn't want Sophie's voice carrying across the courtyard where his authority required a visible response. But she had staged it perfectly—six witnesses, broad daylight, her Luna pendant catching the sun.

"The dog needs to be put down," Sophie said, looking at Emmett now, not me. "And she needs to be disciplined for endangering pack members."

Emmett's eyes flicked to me. I stood with the tray balanced in both hands, my face blank, my body still. I had learned stillness in the four weeks since the rejection. I had learned to hold everything inside my chest where no one could see it move.

He crossed the courtyard in four strides. I didn't flinch. Didn't brace. I watched his hand come up and felt the blow land across my cheek with enough force to send me sideways into the courtyard wall.

The tray hit the stone. Porcelain shattered. Tea spread in a dark stain across the ground.

I tasted blood. The impact had split something inside my mouth, and I felt the copper warmth spread across my tongue. My vision blurred for half a second, then cleared.

Six warriors watched. Reid Calloway's jaw went tight, a muscle jumping under the skin, but his boots stayed planted. No one moved. No one spoke.

I pushed myself upright against the wall. Slowly. My hands found the stone, pressed flat, and I levered myself back to standing without assistance. I did not touch my face. Did not wipe the blood from my lip. I looked at the shattered tray on the ground, at the tea spreading between the cracks, and I bent to pick up the pieces.

My hands didn't shake. Not here. Not in front of them.

I set the tray upright. Collected the largest shards of porcelain and placed them carefully in the center. Then I straightened, turned, and walked back toward the pack house at the same measured pace I had walked out.

Behind me, Sophie's voice rose again, something about gratitude and discipline. Emmett's reply was clipped and dismissive. I didn't turn to listen.

I walked inside. Set the tray on the kitchen counter. Pressed two fingers to the dead mark on my neck and felt nothing answer.

Then I went to the servants' quarters and waited for night.

—

At 2:51 in the morning, I rolled myself to the terminal for the last time.

My cheek throbbed. The split inside my mouth had stopped bleeding hours ago, but I could still taste copper when I swallowed. The crescent brand on my forearm was four days old, still raw, still weeping clear fluid when I moved wrong. My wolf was silent. She had been silent for weeks now, buried so deep under the wolfsbane and silver that some nights I forgot she had ever spoken at all.

But my hands remembered how to work.

I logged in. My credentials held. They always held.

I opened the file I had been building piece by piece, night after night, in the narrow window between patrol passes and camera arcs. Medical wing footage: Emmett's voice, cold and clinical, ordering Marcus to inject silver into my mark site and administer concentrated wolfsbane twice daily. Banquet hall footage: my collapse, the blood, Emmett's hand resting on Sophie's back while I bled out our pup on the floor. Financial records: three transfers from the Luna discretionary account to an external supplier, procuring wolfsbane tinctures in bulk. And my own written account, timestamped and detailed, documenting the silver branding, the forced suppression, the staged confrontation in the courtyard.

I compiled it into a single encrypted file.

Then I opened the emergency protocol I had installed two years ago, when I was still Luna, still useful, still someone Emmett pretended to value. It was designed for direct contact with the Lycan Council in the event of a territorial crisis or a challenge to pack law that required external arbitration. I had built it myself. Tested it once. Never revoked.

I attached the file. Entered the Council's secure relay code. And pressed send.

The screen blinked. Processing. Then: Delivery confirmed. 3:17 a.m.

I stared at the confirmation for a long moment. My hands were steady. My breathing was even. Somewhere far below all of that, in a place the wolfsbane couldn't reach, something that had been keeping score for weeks finally closed the ledger.

I logged out. Wiped the terminal history. Rolled back through the blind on the four-count.

In the servants' quarters, I lay on the cot and pressed two fingers to the cold place on my neck. My wolf didn't answer. But I didn't need her to.

I had already spoken.