The great hall assignment came at four in the morning.

Iris shook my shoulder in the dark. I was already awake—I'd been awake since two, lying on the cot with my grandmother's journals pressed against my ribs, listening to the other Omegas breathe.

"Luna wants the hall done before dawn," Iris whispered. "Warrior inspection at six."

I sat up. "That's two hours."

"I know." She wouldn't meet my eyes. "She said you'd manage."

I pulled on my work clothes in the dark and walked to the great hall with a bucket and rags. The space was massive—forty feet of stone floor, the long tables pushed against the walls, the ceremonial platform at the far end where Ethan had spoken the rejection vow six days ago. The air still smelled faintly of the incense they'd burned.

I started at the entrance and worked my way in.

The stone was cold under my knees. I scrubbed in steady lines, the way my grandmother had taught me—overlapping strokes, no gaps. My hands went numb after the first thirty minutes. I kept going.

At five-thirty, I heard footsteps in the corridor. Multiple sets. I didn't look up.

The training equipment rack stood near the west wall—a temporary setup for the warrior drills scheduled later that week. I'd noticed it when I came in: iron weights stacked unevenly, the base slightly off-center. Unstable.

I'd planned to report it after I finished the floor.

The rack collapsed at 5:47.

The sound was enormous—metal crashing on stone, weights scattering, the wooden frame splintering. I jerked back, my rag still in my hand, as iron plates rolled across the section of floor I'd just cleaned.

For three seconds, the hall was silent.

Then Natasha's voice came from the doorway, warm and concerned. "Oh no."

I turned.

She stood in the entrance with Ethan beside her, flanked by two warriors. Her expression was perfect—shock, disappointment, a trace of sympathy. She'd practiced this.

"What happened?" Ethan's voice was flat.

Natasha stepped forward, careful to avoid the scattered weights. "I assigned the Omega to clean before the inspection. The rack must have been bumped."

I opened my mouth.

"It wasn't—" I started.

Natasha's gaze flicked to me, just for a second. Her eyes were cold.

"It's so difficult," she continued, her voice carrying to the warriors in the corridor now gathering to watch, "maintaining standards with untrained Omegas. I know she's doing her best. But this is a significant lapse."

Ethan walked past me to examine the rack. He crouched, ran his hand over the splintered base. I saw the exact moment he decided not to look closer—the tiny shift in his shoulders, the way his jaw set.

He stood. Turned to me.

"Doubled work schedule," he said. "Next week. Report to the Luna for additional assignments."

My wolf surged. Silent. Furious.

I locked my knees and said nothing.

Natasha touched Ethan's arm, a small gesture of support. "I'll supervise more closely," she said softly. "We'll get her trained properly."

They left together. The warriors followed.

I stood in the wreckage of the equipment rack and the ruined floor and breathed.

Then I picked up my rag and started over.

—

That afternoon, I went to the care wing.

My mother's room was at the end of the corridor, a small space with a single window overlooking the pack gardens. She was sitting up when I arrived, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze somewhere distant.

"Mom." I closed the door behind me.

She blinked. Focused. "Sophia."

Her voice was softer than it used to be. Fogged.

I crossed to her bedside and set down the cleaning supply bottle I'd smuggled in—green glass, unlabeled, the antidote inside measured to the exact dose. I'd been brewing it in secret for three months, hiding the compounds in the servants' wing, administering it whenever I could slip away unnoticed.

"Time for your medicine," I said quietly.

She took the bottle without questioning. She'd stopped questioning two weeks ago, when the fog had gotten thick enough that she couldn't track what was real and what wasn't.

I watched her drink. The dose was small, bitter. She grimaced.

"There's a formula," she said suddenly. Her gaze sharpened, just a fraction. "I keep trying to remember. The ratio. It's wrong somewhere."

My chest tightened.

"What ratio?" I kept my voice level.

"Yarrow to cedarwood." Her brow furrowed. "Your grandmother's formula. The one for... for..."

She trailed off. Lost the thread.

I took her hand. Her fingers were cold.

"I know," I said quietly. "I know what it is. Stay quiet about it until I tell you it's safe."

She looked at me. For a moment, the fog cleared completely, and I saw the healer she used to be—sharp, precise, the woman who'd taught me to identify wolfsbane by scent alone.

"She's using them," my mother whispered. "Isn't she."

It wasn't a question.

I squeezed her hand once. "Yes."

"And the food."

"Yes."

My mother closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the fog was back, but something underneath it had shifted. Resolve.

"How long until the blood moon?" she asked.

I calculated. "Five weeks."

She nodded slowly. "I can last five weeks."

I stayed with her until the light through the window turned gold. Then I tucked the empty bottle back in my pocket and left.

—

The pack assembly was mandatory.

They called it at sundown—every wolf in Shadowvale, gathered on the training grounds for a territorial address. I stood at the back with the other Omegas, my arms crossed, my gaze on the platform where Ethan stood with Natasha at his side.

The ceremonial totem was on display near the platform's edge—a carved bone relic from Shadowvale's founding bloodline, intricate and ancient, mounted on a waist-high pedestal. It had been there for decades. Untouched. Sacred.

Natasha walked past it as Ethan began speaking.

I saw her shoulder shift. Deliberate. Precise.

The totem rocked on its pedestal, tipped, and fell.

The crack of bone on stone was sharp and final.

The crowd went silent.

Natasha turned, her hand flying to her mouth. "Oh my goddess."

Every head turned toward the shattered relic. Then toward me.

Natasha's voice carried across the grounds, clear and distressed. "I saw the Omega servant—she was standing right there—she must have bumped it when she passed."

I hadn't moved. I was fifteen feet away.

Ethan's gaze locked on me. Cold. Absolute.

"Come here," he said.

I walked forward. The crowd parted. Two hundred wolves watching.

I stopped at the base of the platform.

Ethan stepped down. Stood in front of me.

"Did you touch the totem?" His voice was level.

"No." I kept my gaze on his.

"Luna Natasha says you did."

"She's lying."

The words came out flat. True.

Ethan's jaw tightened.

Then he used his Alpha tone.

The command hit like a physical force—supernatural pressure compressing my chest, driving down on my shoulders, my knees. My body responded against my will. My legs buckled. I went down hard, my knees slamming into the stone, my muscles locking.

I couldn't move. Couldn't speak. My jaw clenched so tight I tasted blood.

"Three days," Ethan said. His voice was cold and final. "No meals. Omega quarters. Dismissed."

The pressure released.

I stayed on my knees for three seconds, breathing.

Then I stood.

My wolf didn't submit. She erupted.

Not outward—I had no shift, no voice, no access—but inward, a silent volcanic fury that vibrated through my ribs like a second heartbeat. My vision sharpened. My hands steadied.

I looked at Ethan.

He looked away first.

I turned and walked off the training grounds. The crowd parted again.

As I passed Beta Marcus, I saw him shift his weight. Uncomfortable.

I filed it.

Three days without food.

Five weeks until the blood moon.

I could last.

The medicinal garden sat behind the healer's cabin, walled off from the kitchen wing by a hedge of rosemary my grandmother had planted before I was born. Nobody guarded it. Nobody thought an Omega on a food ban would know what half the plants inside it even were.

They didn't know I'd grown up here.

I ate dandelion greens the first morning, chickweed the second, a handful of wild sorrel folded into my sleeve on the third. Bitter, thin food. It kept me upright. My grandmother used to say a healer who couldn't feed herself off the land wasn't a healer at all, just someone who'd memorized a book. I chewed the sorrel slowly and thought about how right she'd been.

The cabin's side window faced the garden, low enough that I could see in without trying. On the second afternoon, a warrior I recognized—Kade, one of the Deltas—came in favoring his left shoulder, the joint swollen and red under his shirt.

Natasha examined him with her back to the window, her voice warm and certain through the glass. "Inflammation. Classic presentation." She turned to her shelf, selected a jar, measured out a suppressive compound—the kind that dulled swelling by shutting down circulation to the site.

Wrong.

The swelling pattern, the heat radiating off his skin, the way he flinched when she pressed near the joint and not on it—that wasn't inflammation settling. That was infection trying to surface. He needed a drawing compound, something to pull the poison up and out, not seal it in.

If she gave him what was in her hand, the infection would go deeper. Into the joint. Maybe into the bone.

I didn't move. I didn't call out.

I watched Kade take the tincture, thank her, and leave still favoring the shoulder, and I felt my wolf stir behind my ribs—not the hot fury from the training grounds, but something cooler. Patient. A predator noting distance to a target it wasn't ready to close on yet.

I pulled my log from the jacket lining and wrote it down. Date. Name. Her formula. The correct one beside it, in case anyone ever needed to compare.

The list was getting long.

—

I smelled it before I saw the tray.

I was three rooms down the corridor, my arms full of laundry, when it hit me—not a suspicion, not a hunch, but a fact, as solid and legible as if someone had written it on my skin. Wolfsbane. Trace concentration, cut into the porridge, masked under honey and cinnamon.

My feet were moving before I decided to move them.

I reached the care wing corridor as the serving girl set the tray outside my mother's door. I intercepted it with both hands, calm, efficient, the way I'd learned to move when I didn't want to be noticed.

"I'll take that in," I said. She didn't argue. Omegas ran trays all the time.

Inside, I scraped the contaminated portion into a cloth and replaced it with plain oats from my own ration, warmed on the small burner my mother kept for tea. She watched me do it without a word, her eyes tracking the movement with more clarity than I'd seen from her in days.

I logged the concentration when I got back to my cot. My hand was steady. My chest was not.

The pressure behind my ribs had a rhythm to it now. A pulse that wasn't mine, keeping time under my own heartbeat, patient and waiting.

Whatever I'd buried three years ago wasn't asleep anymore.

—

Ethan's office smelled like cedar polish and old paper, unchanged in six days, unchanged in three years. He didn't stand when I entered.

"Your mother's antidote regimen is being reviewed," he said, not looking up from the ledger on his desk. "Cost efficiency. The pack can't sustain indefinite treatment for a retired healer."

I said nothing.

"Continued care depends on your conduct." Now he looked up. "The banquet for Alpha Voss is in four days. I expect exemplary service. Complete discretion."

I held his gaze. First time since the platform.

His jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly, the way it used to when he was young and unsure and trying not to show it. For half a second I saw the boy who'd once told me my hands smelled like the whole forest, like he meant it as the highest compliment he had.

Then it was gone, folded back into the Alpha.

"Understood?" he said.

"Understood," I said, and left.

In the corridor, my thumb found the inside of my wrist, pressed once, steady as stone.

He thought he'd handed me a leash.

He didn't know I'd been brewing the antidote myself for three months, hidden behind lye soap on a servant's shelf, dosed to the milligram, need nothing from his ledger at all.

Four days until the banquet.

Five weeks until the blood moon.

Something under my ribs kept its slow, patient rhythm, and waited with me.

The pack house had a different sound to it that morning. Warriors straightened without being told. Servants moved faster, quieter. Even Natasha, passing me in the corridor with an armful of towels, dropped her voice instead of using it as a weapon.

"The Lycan Prince is here," Iris whispered when I asked. "Envoy business. He's staying through the banquet."

I didn't know what a Lycan Prince was supposed to look like. I'd heard the word Lycan the way you hear the word king in a fairy tale — distant, decorative, nothing to do with scrubbing floors in Oregon.

I saw him for the first time from the end of the east corridor, a mop in my hands, my eyes down the way three years had trained them. Tall. Dark hair, dark coat, the kind of stillness that made the warriors flanking him look restless by comparison. A man behind him — his Beta, I guessed — matched his pace without needing to be told the rhythm of it.

I kept my head down and kept moving.

He stopped.

I felt it before I understood it — the change in the air, a held breath from a man twenty feet away. When I looked up, just for a second, his jaw had gone tight on one side, and his eyes had found me with an intensity that had nothing to do with an Omega mopping a floor.

Three seconds. Maybe four.

Then it was gone. His face smoothed back into whatever face princes wear, and he continued down the corridor like nothing had happened.

I told myself it was nothing. I had a floor to finish.

—

The pack meeting was held in the east hall, the diplomatic table set with Shadowvale's good linens — linens I'd have to launder by hand tonight, most likely, once Ethan's guests were done wrinkling them. I moved along the perimeter with a tray of refreshments, invisible in the way I'd perfected. Ethan sat at the head of the table, laying out territory maps for Alpha Voss's alliance. Natasha sat beside him, her hand resting on his forearm at intervals, like punctuation.

The Lycan Prince sat across from them, unreadable, his attention moving over the maps with a precision that made Ethan's presentation sound thinner every time the Prince asked a question.

I came around the far side of the table to refill a water pitcher.

The scent hit him before I'd even reached the chair. I saw it happen — his head lifted a fraction, like a wolf catching wind on a still day, and his eyes came straight to me. Not polite. Not diplomatic. Direct, in a way that made my pulse do something strange and unfamiliar in my throat.

His jaw tightened. Held. One second, two, three.

I froze with the pitcher half-tilted, water pooling at the lip of the glass I was supposed to be filling. Something in my chest — the same pressure that had been building for weeks — surged toward the surface, curious, straining, like it recognized something I didn't.

I shut it down. Finished pouring. Moved on.

Neither of us said a word. But I felt his eyes on my back for the rest of the meeting, and something told me this wasn't the last time.

—

The pack run was called for sundown, in rain that had been falling since noon and showed no sign of stopping.

"Full territorial circuit," Ethan announced to the assembled wolves. "Everyone shifts." His gaze found me at the edge of the crowd. "Except the wolfless Omega. She'll run human, as Luna Natasha's pace partner."

A ripple of laughter went through the pack. Natasha's smile was radiant.

I didn't argue. Three years had taught me the exact shape of a losing argument.

The course was six miles of forest trail, rock, and mud, and I ran every step of it on two legs while shifted wolves streamed past me on four, their strides eating the ground I fought for inch by inch. Natasha's silver-brown wolf circled back twice to trot beside me, just long enough to be seen doing it, before pulling ahead again.

By mile four, my legs had stopped being legs. By mile five, something in my knee gave with a wet, tearing pop, and I went down hard into the mud, the freezing rain filling my mouth before I could turn my head.

I couldn't get up.

The pack came around the bend behind me — dozens of wolves, paws thundering, and none of them slowed. Ethan's black-and-silver wolf, massive and unmistakable, came last. His paw landed inches from my face as he stepped over me without breaking stride.

I lay in the mud and let myself feel it. All of it. Cold and clean and precise, no suppression, no swallowing it down for later. The fury didn't burn. It settled, deep in my bones, alongside the pressure that had stopped waiting weeks ago.

The pack passed. The rain kept falling.

Then a shape crouched beside me — human, warm hands under my shoulders. Marcus, water running off his hair, said nothing as he lifted me out of the mud and carried me toward the healer's cabin.

He didn't need to say what he was thinking.

Neither did I.