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.

The garden at dusk was quiet, which was why I liked it. No betas watching me eat. No pitying half-smiles from Silvercrest staff who didn't know what to do with a rejected Luna wandering their halls.

Then the pup went still, then not-still, all at once—a jolt through the mind-link like a held breath breaking.

*Something's wrong,* she said. *I don't know what. It just feels wrong.*

"Nothing's wrong," I whispered, pressing both hands flat over my stomach. "We're safe. We're inside the walls."

*It doesn't feel like walls matter right now.*

I didn't have an answer for that. I sat on the stone bench with my knees pulled up as far as they'd go and breathed through it, the way Aris used to tell me to breathe through the treatments, except this time there was no needle, no burn, just a fear I couldn't name coming from something that wasn't fully born yet.

Footsteps on gravel. I didn't look up until the bench dipped beside me.

Kael didn't ask what was wrong. He didn't ask anything. He just sat, hands loose on his knees, looking out at the same dark hedges I was looking at, and let the silence stretch between us like it belonged there.

Slowly, the pup's panic uncoiled. I felt it happen in real time—the frantic edge softening, smoothing, settling into something almost like curiosity. *Warm,* she said. *That's warm. Pine and something sharp. I like it.*

I kept my face still. I didn't want him to see what that admission cost me.

"She's calmer," I said finally, because the silence had gone on long enough that saying nothing felt like its own kind of confession.

"Good," he said, and nothing else.

I studied the side of his face, the tight line of his jaw that never fully relaxed, not even here, not even now. "How do you live with grief that big?" I asked. "Losing a brother. Wearing a crown you didn't want yet."

He didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice was low, even, worn smooth by however many nights he'd turned the question over alone.

"I stopped living with it," he said. "I just carried it."

I looked away first. The mate bond hummed low and warm between us, unasked-for, unclaimed, and my hand drifted toward the dead scar on my neck before I caught myself and pulled it back into my lap.

---

Marcus's warriors caught Aris at the border crossing two nights later, sweating through his coat with a duffel bag half-packed and no plan past *away*. By the time they walked him into the compound in silver-lined cuffs, he'd already started confessing before anyone asked him a question, words tumbling out faster than his own fear could catch up to them.

Two hours of interrogation gave the Council everything. The wolfsbane. Remy's payments. The panicked night of the swap, his hand closing around the wrong vial in the cryo-reserve because his own hands wouldn't stop shaking.

I asked to see him alone. Kael's jaw tightened. "I don't think—"

"I didn't ask what you think."

He let me go.

Aris wouldn't meet my eyes across the small table. His glasses had slid down his nose and he didn't push them up.

"How long," I said, "was I being poisoned before I stopped even trying to shift?"

His mouth opened, closed. "The dosage was low. Cumulative. I didn't think—" He stopped, started again. "Within the first year. It would have started suppressing wolf development within the first year of treatment."

Something in my chest went very quiet. "So I was never wolfless."

"No," he whispered. "You were never wolfless."

I stood, thanked him for his honesty, which felt obscene even as I said it, and walked out. In the corridor I pressed my back to the cold stone and breathed until my legs remembered how to hold me up. Then I kept walking.

---

The report came through Marcus that evening, delivered flat and fast, no softening in it.

"A Nightshade informant confirms Conner knows Aris is in our custody. He and Remy met with a bribed Omega from your safehouse detail two hours ago." Marcus's eyes cut to Kael, then to me. "They have the location. They're moving tonight. No moon. No warning window before they cross the perimeter."

I felt the pup go rigid inside the link, her fear sharpening into something almost like a scream.

*They're coming,* she said. *Mama, they're already coming.*