Three days is a long time when your body is running on grief and stream water.

I slept in the hollows of old oaks, back pressed against the damp wood, arms wrapped around my stomach like I could hold everything together by sheer force. The first night I cried until I couldn't, then stopped, because crying cost warmth I didn't have. The second night I just lay there and listened to the forest breathe.

The pup kept me moving.

*Left at the split oak,* it would say, that small clear voice threading through the mind-link like a compass needle finding north. *That stream runs clean. Drink from it.*

I stopped questioning how it knew. By the second day I just listened.

On the second night, though, I sat down beneath a wide oak and couldn't make myself stand back up right away. The rejection-scar on my neck had gone from burning to a dull, hollow ache, like a tooth socket after an extraction. I pressed two fingers against it through my scarf and stared up at the branches.

"Why can you talk?" I asked aloud. My voice came out rougher than I expected. "Most pups can't do this. Not before they're born."

A pause. Then: *Lycan royal wolves develop awareness early. I can feel the blood. It's different from a regular wolf's. Older, somehow.*

I sat with that. The trees dripped somewhere nearby.

"Did you know?" I asked. "Before I did. Did you know what Conner was doing to us?"

*I knew something was wrong with what the healer gave you. It tasted like burning.* Another pause, shorter this time. *I'm sorry I couldn't tell you sooner. I wasn't strong enough yet.*

My throat tightened. I pressed my palm flat against my stomach instead of answering.

After a moment I asked: "What's your name?"

*I haven't chosen one.*

"That's okay." I leaned my head back against the bark. "We'll choose it together. When this is over."

The warmth that moved through the link then was small and steady, like a single candle in a very dark room. I held onto it and eventually slept.

---

The Silvercrest compound appeared through the tree line on the afternoon of the third day—stone walls the color of winter granite, guard towers at each corner, the Silvercrest banner hanging still in cold air. It was larger than I'd imagined. More fortress than home.

I looked down at myself. Dirt on my coat, mud caked to my boots, hair pulled back in a knot that had stopped being neat two days ago. The dead mark sat above my scarf like a brand everyone here would read immediately.

Packless. Rejected. Rogue.

*Walk straight,* the pup said. *Don't let them see you hesitate.*

I walked straight.

The gate warriors saw me coming from fifty yards out. Four of them, built like the compound walls, their auras pressing outward in a wall of controlled dominance that made the air feel thick. One stepped forward before I reached the gate, palm raised.

"State your pack and purpose."

"No pack." I kept my voice level. "My purpose is an audience with the Lycan King. My business is his."

The warrior's eyes dropped to my stomach, then to my neck, then back to my face. His expression didn't change but his hand moved toward my arm.

"Rogues don't get audiences. Turn around and—"

The main hall door opened.

I don't know what made me look up at that exact moment. Maybe the shift in the warriors' posture, the way they all straightened half an inch at once. Maybe something the pup felt before I did.

He was tall. Dark coat, no crown, no regalia—just a man walking out of a doorway who made every other person in the yard feel smaller by existing. He moved like someone who had never once needed to prove what he was.

Then the wind shifted.

He stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped—like something had stepped in front of him that he hadn't seen coming. His head turned toward me, and for a moment the absolute control on his face cracked open, just slightly, just enough.

I felt it too. A warmth that moved through the cold hollow in my chest where Conner's mark used to live. Not fire. Not the desperate pull I'd felt when I first met Conner. Something steadier. Like a hand extended in a dark room.

I did not reach for it.

I pulled my spine straight, lifted my chin, and met his dark, stilled eyes across the yard.

"I'm Amiyah West," I said, loud enough to carry, steady enough to mean it. "Daughter of the late Alpha of Ironwood territory. My unborn pup carries Silvercrest royal blood, and I have documentation to prove it." I held his gaze. "I'm not asking for charity. I'm requesting an audience."

The yard was very quiet.

Kael Silvercrest looked at me for a long moment—at the dead mark, at the mud on my boots, at my hand resting against my stomach—and something moved behind his eyes that I couldn't name yet.

He stepped aside and held the door open.

"Come in," he said.

They brought me to a room with no throne in it, which surprised me. Just a long table, tall windows, and a healer with steady hands and older eyes than his face suggested. Elias Silvercrest sat at the head of the table like the weight of a crown he no longer wore still pressed down on his shoulders. His mate sat beside him, spine straight, hands folded so tightly her knuckles had gone pale.

"This will only take a moment," the healer said, and drew three drops of my blood into a shallow silver dish. He added a second vial—something dark, viscous, marked with a small crest I didn't recognize. "Preserved sample. Prince Landon's."

The room went very still.

The two liquids met in the dish and turned the color of moonlight on water, glowing faint silver-blue, then steadying into a soft, unmistakable shimmer. The healer exhaled through his nose. "Positive. Direct paternal match. This child carries Prince Landon Silvercrest's blood."

No one spoke for three full seconds.

Then the former Luna made a sound I will never forget—not quite a sob, not quite a cry, something older than both. She crossed the room in four steps and took my hands in hers, and her fingers were shaking.

"Landon," she whispered, staring at my stomach like she could see through skin and muscle to the pup underneath. "Landon, my boy—" Her composure, whatever careful thing had been holding her together for months, cracked wide open. Tears ran freely down her face and she didn't wipe them away.

Elias rose from his chair slowly, like a man twice his age. He looked at me for a long moment, and I watched grief and disbelief and something fiercer than both move across his face.

"This child," he said, and his voice carried through the room without needing to be raised, "is our grandchild. Our son's legacy." He turned to the healer, to the guards by the door, to every silent witness in that room. "The full weight of this house stands behind his mother. Let that be known to everyone under this roof."

I looked across the room and found Kael already watching me. The ice that had lived behind his eyes since the gate had cracked clean through—I could see it, the way his jaw worked, the way his hands, usually so still, curled slightly at his sides.

He crossed to me. "The Crown extends its full protection to you and your pup," he said, quiet enough that it was only for me. "Whatever you need."

"I accept the protection," I said. "But I want to be clear about something." I straightened, ignoring the ache still living in my legs. "I want justice. I want my father's territory returned through proper legal channels. I want Conner destroyed the right way, in front of everyone who watched him do this to me." I met his eyes. "I'm not here to be anyone's ward."

Something shifted in his expression—not offense. Respect, maybe. "Understood," he said simply.

---

That evening he came to my door himself, a tray balanced in one hand though I hadn't asked for food. I opened it halfway, one hand still resting on the frame.

"You should eat," he said.

"I know how to feed myself."

"I didn't say you didn't." A pause. "I wanted an excuse to knock."

We stood there, the door half-open between us, and he told me about Landon—the way he used to sneak out through the kitchen window even though the front door was never locked, the reckless laugh he had, the ambush that took him in under ten minutes on a patrol he shouldn't have led alone. His voice stayed even the whole time, but his hands didn't.

I didn't interrupt. When he finished, I said, "My pup will know where his father's blood came from. I'll make sure of it."

Kael's jaw tightened. He nodded once, and left without touching me. But his scent—winter pine, sharp ozone—stayed behind in the room long after the door clicked shut, and through the mind-link I felt the pup settle, warm and quiet, recognizing something in it that I couldn't name yet myself.

---

The week that followed blurred into ledgers and maps. Silvercrest intelligence gave me access to surveillance records I never could have gathered alone—grain shipments diverted from Ironwood storehouses, border taxes collected and never reported, infrastructure left to rot while Conner funneled the difference into Nightshade accounts. I cross-referenced every page against my father's old records until the pattern stood out clear as a wound.

Kael passed through once, said nothing, just looked at the files stacked and labeled across the table. I felt his eyes linger longer than they needed to.

"You've organized this better than my Beta manages a war room," he said finally.

I didn't look up. My hand moved to the cold scar at my throat without my permission. "I had motivation," I said, and kept working.

Kael found me in the map room a little after sunrise, still in yesterday's clothes, my finger stuck on a grain shipment that didn't match my father's old export records. "Marcus rides for Nightshade within the hour," he said. "You should see this delivered."

I followed him down a corridor I hadn't been in before, into a small stone room with a single black mirror mounted on the far wall—no bigger than a windowpane. A Silvercrest spy had planted a listening stone in Nightshade's great hall months before Landon died, Kael told me, standard border surveillance. It had never been useful for anything until now.

The glass flickered to life like dark water catching light.

Marcus rode in alone, no escort, which told me everything about how little he thought of Conner's threat level. He walked into the great hall with the Luna Accord rolled under one arm and dropped it on the table in front of Conner without a word of greeting.

"From the Silvercrest Crown," Marcus said, his voice flat through the stone's distortion but still clear enough to raise the hair on my arms. "Return the Ironwood territory in full, or answer for it before the Lycan Council."

Conner unrolled it. Read it once. His jaw ticked. Read it again.

I watched disbelief cross his face first, the same look he used to wear when a hunt didn't go his way. Then fury, red climbing up his throat. And then—for one unguarded second, so brief I almost missed it—fear. His eyes flicked toward the door like he expected Kael himself to be standing there.

Remy leaned over his shoulder to read it and went pale.

"This is a fabrication," Conner said too loudly, to the row of Nightshade betas lining the wall. "She seduced the Lycan King with some engineered bond. This whole bloodline claim is a scheme to steal my territory."

Nobody in the hall cheered him. I watched three betas exchange a look, and one older woman near the back—Elder Whitfield's daughter, I thought—didn't lower her eyes fast enough to hide what she was thinking.

Marcus turned and left without another word. He didn't need to argue. The document had already done its work.

Kael switched the stone off. "That will spread through the pack by nightfall," he said. "Doubt is a slow poison. Let it work."

I thought of seven years of pity dressed up as sympathy, and said nothing.

---

Two days later, another feed came through—this one audio only, pulled from a bug near Conner's private study. I sat across from Kael at the long table while a Silvercrest analyst played it back, and I made myself listen without flinching.

Aris's voice came first, stammering, thick with the particular terror I remembered from every appointment he'd ever given me. "Alpha, I—I ran the panel twice. Your motility count is—it's consistent with prolonged wolfsbane exposure. Cellular damage. It's not reversible with anything I have."

Silence. Then Conner's voice, low and dangerous. "Say that again."

"You're infertile, Alpha. It's been happening for months. Possibly longer."

A chair scraped. Footsteps. Then Remy's voice, bright and brittle, trying to smooth something that was already broken. "Conner, baby, I don't know what he's talking about—"

"You handled it," Conner said. "The wolfsbane. In our rooms. Don't lie to me."

"I did it for us!" Her voice cracked into a scream on the last word. "Everything I did was for us, Conner, I got rid of her, I gave you an heir's mother, I—"

The sound that followed was a body hitting a wall, and Remy's breath going out in a sharp gasp.

"You're a liability," Conner said, quiet now, which was somehow worse than shouting. "Do you understand what you've done?"

The recording cut to static. Kael reached over and stopped it there.

I sat with my hands flat on the table, feeling something I hadn't expected—not triumph, not yet. Just a cold, settling certainty that the two of them were finally starting to eat each other alive.

"There's more," Kael said. "An hour ago, Remy sent a message to Aris. Told him to disappear—leave the territory, burn his records, never testify." His eyes met mine, steady, already sharpened toward the next move. "We intercepted it before it reached him fully."

"He's the only witness who can put the wolfsbane and the swap in the same room," I said. "If he crosses the border—"

"He won't." Kael's voice dropped into something with teeth in it, the same tone I imagined he used on his own warriors. He turned toward the door, where Marcus already stood waiting, having clearly heard enough. "Find him before he crosses the border. Bring him back alive and talking."

Marcus nodded once and was gone.

Through the mind-link, small and warm, the pup stirred. *He's scared,* she said. *I can feel it, even from here. Good.*

I pressed my palm flat against my stomach and, for the first time since the ceremony, let myself smile.