The footsteps came back.

Not Cole's this time. Heavier. Unhurried. The walk of a man who owned the ground he walked on.

I was already standing when the door opened.

Tate stepped inside carrying a tin cup. Simple. Unremarkable. The kind of cup you'd see in any pack kitchen. He held it loosely, the way you'd carry coffee to a desk, and the casualness of it made my wolf go absolutely silent.

Still. Watchful.

"Alyssa," he said. His voice was even. Quiet. Almost kind.

I looked at the cup. Then at him.

Something in the air hit me—faintly bitter, medicinal, underneath the smell of stone and damp earth. My wolf recognized it before my conscious mind did. She slammed herself against my ribs so hard I nearly staggered.

Wolfsbane.

"You don't have to do this," I said.

"I know." He set the cup on the small ledge beside the door. His expression was calm. Regretful, even. The same face he'd worn when he performed his apology in our bedroom. "You made it necessary."

"I made it necessary." I kept my voice steady. "I found the ledgers. That's what I did."

"You couldn't leave it alone." He moved toward me, unhurried. "If you had just been what you were supposed to be—Luna, mother, partner—none of this would have happened. I didn't want this, Alyssa. I want you to know that."

I backed up until the stone wall pressed cold against my shoulders.

"Flora's son is the Morrison heir," he continued. Matter-of-fact. Like he was explaining pack logistics. "He's been the heir for three years. Your pup—" He paused. "Your pup is a complication. A bloodline dispute waiting to happen. I can't allow that."

"He's your child," I said. My voice cracked on the last word. I hated that it cracked.

Something moved across his face. Not guilt. Something closer to inconvenience.

"Sit down," he said.

"No."

He reached for the cup.

My wolf exploded.

I launched myself at him before he could close the distance—not a calculated move, not strategy, just pure maternal fury driving my body forward. My shoulder hit his chest and he stumbled back a step, the cup tilting. I grabbed for it, trying to knock it from his hand. He caught my wrist.

His grip was iron.

"Stop," he said.

Not the Alpha tone. Just his voice. And somehow that was worse.

I clawed at his hand with my free arm. My wolf was surging, pushing toward the shift, but I was five months along and the transformation would—I couldn't—

I drove my knee upward. He turned his hip and took it on his thigh, barely flinching. He was an Alpha in his own territory, in full health, and I was pregnant and sedative-soft and running on nothing but terror and love for the child I was carrying.

He forced me back against the wall. One hand pinned my wrists above my head. The other raised the cup.

"It'll be quick," he said. "I'm not trying to hurt you."

I twisted my head away. He caught my jaw, fingers pressing into my cheeks, forcing my mouth toward the cup's rim.

The smell hit me full force—bitter, chemical, wrong. My wolf howled. I howled with her, the sound tearing out of my throat raw and ragged, and I felt the liquid touch my lips—

The wall came apart.

Not the door. The wall.

Stone and timber exploded inward in a single detonating crash, and the sound was so enormous it knocked Tate sideways, the cup spinning from his hand and clattering across the stone floor. Dust billowed. I slid down the wall and hit the ground on my knees, coughing, one arm wrapped around my belly.

Through the dust and the ringing in my ears, I heard wolves.

Not Ironveil wolves. Something different. Bigger. The controlled, devastating force of animals that had been trained by the best Alpha on the East Coast and pointed at a single target.

Tate's guards lasted less than a minute. I heard it without seeing it—the sounds of a brawl that was never a contest, brief and absolute and merciless.

Then the dust shifted, and my father walked through the broken wall.

Alan Moore. Alpha of Silvercrest. He was in human form, which somehow made him more frightening than any wolf. His eyes swept the room once—Tate on the floor, the tin cup, the wolfsbane smell still hanging in the air—and something moved across his face that I had never seen there before.

Not Alpha authority. Not tactical calculation.

Raw, devastating fury. The kind that has no performance in it.

He crossed the room in four strides and dropped to his knees in front of me.

"Alyssa." His voice was low. Shaking slightly.

"Dad." The word came out small. I hadn't called him that in years.

His arms came around me—careful of my belly, careful of everything—and he lifted me against his chest the way he had when I was a child who'd fallen from a tree in Silvercrest's woods.

Behind us, I heard his warriors subduing Tate. Heard Cole's voice cut off mid-sentence.

I should have felt triumph. I'd planned to feel triumph.

Instead I felt the warmth of my father's arms and the cold burn spreading from my lips, and I knew—with a quiet, terrible certainty—that the wolfsbane had already done something I couldn't take back.

My wolf went very still.

And the pup stopped kicking.

I started bleeding on the highway.

I didn't say anything. I pressed my hand flat against my belly and looked out the window at the dark trees rushing past, and I didn't say anything.

My father was holding me in the back seat, one arm around my shoulders, his chin resting on the top of my head the way he used to when I was small. He felt it when I tensed. His arm tightened.

"Alyssa."

"Keep driving," I said. My voice came out wrong. Too quiet. Too steady.

He told the warrior at the wheel to go faster. Then he pulled me closer and didn't speak again, because there was nothing left to say. I could feel his heartbeat against my temple—fast, for once, not the measured Alpha rhythm I'd grown up measuring my own pulse against. My father's heart was racing.

That scared me more than the pain did.

The rest of the drive is something I don't let myself remember in sequence. Just fragments. The lights of the Silvercrest pack house. Someone opening the car door. Nora Voss's face appearing, her healer's hands already moving, her voice low and controlled. My father's arm refusing to let go until I told him to.

"Wait outside," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment. Something in his face was completely undone—not the Alpha, not the strategist. Just a father who had arrived too late and was being asked to stand in a hallway and wait.

"Please," I said.

He let go.

Nora closed the door behind him.

---

I don't know how long it took. Two hours, maybe. Long enough that the pain stopped being sharp and became something else—a slow, terrible absence, spreading outward from the center of me like cold water.

When it was over, I sat up in the bed and put my hands flat on my thighs and looked at the wall.

Nora sat beside me, quiet. She didn't offer comfort. She had been a healer long enough to know when comfort was the wrong thing. She just stayed close, her presence steady and warm, and let me sit in the silence until I was ready.

I wasn't ready. But I nodded anyway.

She stood, touched my hand once, briefly, and went to the door.

I heard her voice in the corridor—low, careful, devastated in the way that people are devastated when they have to deliver the irreversible. Then a long silence.

Then my father came in.

He crossed the room slowly. Sat in the chair beside the bed. He didn't reach for me. Didn't speak immediately. He just looked at me with those Alpha eyes that had never once flinched at anything, and I watched him flinch.

My wolf surfaced briefly—I felt it in my gaze, the shift in color, the cold weight of silver replacing gold. Nora had mentioned it quietly while she worked. Your wolf's eyes, she'd said. I hadn't responded.

I looked at my father and I said, "I want him to lose everything."

My voice was low. Still. The way stone is still.

Alan didn't say that it would be all right. He didn't tell me to rest, or that I was strong, or that the Moon Goddess had a plan. He sat forward, elbows on his knees, and he said: "I'm sorry I wasn't there sooner."

No justification. No explanation. Just that.

Something in my chest moved. Not breaking open—more like a single seam giving way, just enough to let air in. I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath for three days until that moment.

"He planned it," I said. "All of it. From the beginning."

"I know." His voice was quiet. Final. "And I have already begun."

He paused.

"There is someone else," he said. "Someone whose resources go further than mine. He's been waiting a long time to be useful to you. I think it's time you let him."

I didn't ask who. Not yet. I looked at the wall and let myself feel the weight of what I'd lost, and then I set it down somewhere deep and locked it there. Not gone. Just stored. For later.

First, there was work to do.

---

Three days later, I walked into Silvercrest's council room.

I was still moving carefully. Still sore in ways that had nothing to do with the body. But I was dressed, and my spine was straight, and my wolf—silver-eyed, quieter now, colder—walked with me.

He was standing at the far end of the room.

Taller than I remembered. Broader. The years had done something to him that I hadn't been watching closely enough to track. He carried himself with an ease that wasn't arrogance—it was the particular stillness of someone who has never needed to prove anything to a room, and the room had always already known it. Even my father's senior warriors had lowered their eyes slightly when he entered. I'd heard about it afterward.

But when his gaze found mine, all of that fell away.

It was just Rhys. The boy from the woods. The one who used to chase me through the silver birches in October and let me win sometimes, and I had always known he was letting me win, and neither of us had ever said so.

He didn't cross the room. Didn't reach for me. Didn't do any of the things that would have made me step back.

He just said, "I am here. Tell me what you need, and I will make it happen."

His scent reached me before the words fully settled—warm cedar and honey, something I hadn't smelled in years but recognized instantly, the way you recognize a song you learned as a child. My wolf went very still.

Not the cold, armored stillness of the last three days.

Something different. Something I didn't have a name for yet, and wasn't ready to name.

I looked at him for a long moment.

"Everything," I said. "I want him to lose everything."

Rhys held my gaze. "Then that's what he'll lose."

Simple. Certain. No performance in it.

I believed him.