The soup tasted wrong.

I noticed it halfway through the bowl. A bitter edge beneath the salt, like metal on my tongue. I set the spoon down and stared at the pale broth, watching a thin film of oil swirl on the surface.

Kylie stood across the dining hall, arranging flowers in a vase. She glanced at me once, her lips curving into a smile that didn't reach her eyes.

I pushed the bowl away.

Too late.

By midnight, I was on the floor of my guest room, retching into a basin. My stomach twisted in knots. Sweat soaked through my shirt. My wolf whined somewhere deep inside me, weak and disoriented. The pain came in waves—sharp, burning, like something was clawing its way through my insides.

Wolfsbane. Not enough to kill. Just enough to make me wish I was dead.

I stayed on that floor for three days.

No one came to check on me. Not Duncan. Not Marcus. Not even the Omega who usually brought my laundry assignments. The pack house hummed with life above me—footsteps, laughter, the clink of dishes at meals I couldn't attend.

On the fourth day, I could stand.

I washed my face in cold water. My reflection stared back at me, hollow-eyed and pale. My hands still shook. But I could walk.

I found Kylie in the east hallway, carrying a stack of linens toward the master suite.

"Kylie."

She stopped. Turned. Her eyebrows lifted in false surprise. "Alivia! You're up. I was starting to worry."

"We need to talk."

Her smile tightened. She glanced down the hall—empty—then back at me. "Of course. What's wrong?"

I stepped closer. Close enough to see the flicker of unease in her eyes. "The soup. Three nights ago."

"Oh, that." She shifted the linens in her arms. "I hope it wasn't too salty. The new cook is still learning."

"It wasn't salt."

Silence.

Kylie's smile didn't move. But something changed in her face. A hardness. A coldness I'd seen before, buried under all that sweetness.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

I took another step. My wolf stirred, thin and angry. "Yes. You do."

For a long moment, we just stared at each other.

Then Kylie's mask cracked.

She laughed. Low and sharp. "God, you're pathetic. You actually thought you could come back here and what? Reclaim your life? Your mate?" She dropped the linens on a side table and crossed her arms. "Duncan never wanted you, Alivia. The mate bond was a joke. A political arrangement. He told me everything."

My chest tightened. Not from pain. From rage.

"He faked a coma for five years," she continued, her voice rising. "Five years so he could be with me instead of you. And you know what? It worked. You ran off to the Wastes like a good little martyr, and we got exactly what we wanted."

I said nothing. My hands curled into fists at my sides.

Kylie leaned in, her eyes glittering. "And your precious mother? She didn't just die, Alivia. She was removed. Taken out of the picture so my mother could take her place. And guess who signed off on it?"

My breath stopped.

"Your father," she whispered. "Alpha Albert himself. He wanted my mother. Wanted me. And your mom was in the way. So they made her disappear."

The hallway tilted. My wolf roared inside me, clawing for control. I felt my nails sharpen, my teeth ache. The shift pressed against my skin, desperate to break free.

Kylie smiled. "Go ahead. Shift. Attack me. Give Duncan a reason to throw you out for good."

I forced myself to breathe. Once. Twice. My wolf snarled and thrashed, but I held her back.

I looked at Kylie. At her smug face. At the Luna pendant still hanging around her throat.

Then I turned and walked away.

Her laughter followed me down the hall.

---

I didn't sleep that night.

I sat on the floor of my room, my back against the wall, and let the truth settle over me like a weight.

My mother. Murdered. Covered up. Sanctioned by my own father.

Five years in the Wastes. A lie.

The Devotion Mark. A joke.

Everything I'd given. Everything I'd sacrificed. Built on a foundation of rot.

My wolf pressed against my ribs, still weak but burning now. Not with grief. With something colder. Sharper.

*We're going to destroy them.*

Yes.

I pulled out my phone and opened the encrypted folder Elena had sent me. The bank transfers. The forged medical records. Dr. Garrett's signed NDA.

I started a new file.

Wolfsbane. I'd smelled it in the soup, tasted it on my tongue. Someone had to have purchased it. Someone had to have signed for it. Wolfsbane wasn't something you could just pick up at a corner store—it required pack authorization, a healer's signature, documented use.

I sent Elena a message. *Need purchase records. Wolfsbane. Silverfang Pack. Last six months.*

She replied within an hour. *On it.*

Then I opened a second file. My mother's death certificate. Cause of death: sudden heart failure. No autopsy. No investigation. Signed by Alpha Albert and witnessed by Duncan's father, the previous Silverfang Alpha.

Two powerful Alphas. One convenient death.

I pulled up every document I could find. Pack meeting minutes. Financial records. Correspondence between Silverfang and Moonveil from that year. I cross-referenced dates, names, signatures.

Patterns emerged. Payments. Transfers. A healer who'd retired early and moved out of state. A coroner who'd left the pack suddenly, no forwarding address.

A cover-up. Methodical. Thorough. Expensive.

I worked through the night, compiling everything into a single dossier. By dawn, I had a file thick enough to bury them all.

But I didn't move yet. Didn't send it to the Council. Didn't confront anyone.

I saved it. Encrypted it. Backed it up in three separate locations.

And I waited.

---

Kylie noticed the change in me.

I saw it in the way she watched me now. Not with smug satisfaction. With something else. Unease. Suspicion.

I moved through the pack house quietly. I took my Omega assignments without complaint. I folded laundry. I scrubbed floors. I kept my head down and my mouth shut.

But I was always watching. Always listening.

And Kylie knew it.

She started checking over her shoulder when she walked past me. She stopped leaving her phone unattended. She whispered to Duncan behind closed doors, her voice too low for me to hear but her body language screaming paranoia.

She was scared.

Good.

Two weeks after the wolfsbane, I saw her slip out of the pack house late at night. She wore a dark coat, hood pulled up, and she moved fast, glancing back every few steps.

I followed.

She drove to the edge of neutral territory and parked near an abandoned warehouse. A truck was already there, engine running. Three men stepped out. Rogues. I could smell them from where I crouched behind a stack of crates—unwashed, feral, dangerous.

Kylie handed one of them a thick envelope.

"She's in the lowest guest room," Kylie said. Her voice carried in the still night air. "East wing. No guards. Make it look like an accident."

The rogue opened the envelope and flipped through a stack of bills. He grinned. "When?"

"Soon," Kylie said. "This week. Before she has a chance to—" She stopped herself. Shook her head. "Just do it."

She got back in her car and drove away.

I stayed crouched behind the crates, my heart pounding, my wolf growling low and steady.

Kylie had just hired someone to kill me.

And I had just watched her do it.

I pulled out my phone and hit record. The rogues were still talking, counting the money, laughing about how easy the job would be.

I recorded every word.

Then I slipped back into the shadows and disappeared into the trees.

I picked up the last of the evidence from the safety deposit box a little before sunset.

The wire transfer receipts. The forged medical records. The wolfsbane invoices Elena had pulled from three different suppliers. All of it printed on paper now, tucked inside a plain manila envelope pressed against my chest.

I'd stopped at the bridal boutique on the way back. Kylie had insisted I be measured for a "proper" Luna gown for the alliance banquet next month. Another humiliation. I'd let the seamstress pin the fabric to my shoulders without a word, then walked out just as the streetlights flickered on.

The harbor was two blocks from where I'd parked my car.

I never made it.

They came out of the alley between the fish market and the shipping office. Three of them. I smelled the rogues before I saw them — that greasy, unwashed reek that scraped the back of my throat. My wolf snarled a warning, thin and reedy, and I turned to run.

Something hit me across the back of the skull.

I went down hard on the wet asphalt. The envelope skidded out of my arms into a puddle. A boot came down on my wrist. I heard my own bone crack before I felt it.

"Hold her."

Hands on my ankles. Hands on my shoulders. Then the cold burn of silver, wrapping tight around my wrists, my ankles, biting through the skin. The pain was immediate and enormous. My wolf shrieked and collapsed inside me, curling into a small, useless ball at the bottom of my ribs.

"Get the crate open."

I tried to scream. A gag went in. I tried to shift. The silver hissed against my skin and my wolf whimpered like a dying thing.

I saw the crate. Steel. Lined with more silver, dull and gray in the lamplight. Big enough to fit a body curled tight.

Big enough for me.

They lifted me. I thrashed once, twice, but my arms wouldn't answer. The silver had already burned deep. My skin was smoking. I could smell it.

The lid came down.

Dark. Complete, absolute dark.

I heard the locks click, one after another. Then the scrape of the crate being dragged across concrete. Then nothing but the sound of my own breath rattling in my chest.

And then — falling.

The impact when it hit the water knocked what little air I had out of my lungs. Then the cold came. It punched through the seams first, in thin freezing streams, filling the crate from the bottom up. Ice water crept over my ankles, my knees, my hips.

I thought about Elena. About the dossier in my desk drawer. About my mother.

I thought about Princeton.

I hadn't thought his name in years. It came now unbidden, the memory of a starving boy with huge dark eyes, standing at the edge of Moonveil territory in a jacket three sizes too big. I had bought him soup. I had put him in a foster pack. I had never seen him again.

The water reached my chest.

I'm sorry, I thought, though I didn't know who I was apologizing to. My wolf. My mother. The boy I fed once and forgot.

Myself.

The water reached my throat.

My scent — wildflower and cedar, what was left of it — leaked out of my burning skin and into the black harbor like blood.

Then the water closed over my face and there was nothing.

---

I woke up choking.

Something massive and warm was pressed against my mouth. Salt water came up out of my lungs in great heaving spasms, over and over, until I thought my ribs would crack. I couldn't see. I couldn't feel my hands. Something was roaring above me — no, not roaring. A voice. A voice saying words I couldn't hold onto.

"Breathe. Breathe, breathe, come on, please — breathe for me — "

I breathed.

Air tore into my chest like a knife. I coughed. Coughed again. My eyes cracked open.

A face hung above mine. Dark hair plastered flat against a jaw I didn't recognize. Eyes — impossible eyes — burning gold in the dark. The face of a man, but only barely; the bones underneath were wrong, sharper, longer, half-shifted and struggling to hold their shape.

His hands were on my face. His hands were burned raw, blistered black across the palms where the silver had eaten him. He was shaking. This enormous creature above me was shaking like a child.

"You're alive," he whispered. "You're alive, you're alive, oh Goddess — "

My wolf stirred somewhere at the very bottom of me. She lifted her head. She sniffed.

And then she made a sound I had never heard her make before. A small, broken, joyful whine.

*Mate,* she breathed. *Mate, mate, mate.*

I stared up at him. Water ran off his hair into my eyes.

"Princeton?" I rasped.

His face broke. Just — broke, the way ice breaks under too much weight. Something wet fell from his eyes onto my cheek.

"You remember me," he said.

A long, low growl rolled out of his chest. Not a threat. A vow. His arms slid under my shoulders and my knees and he lifted me like I weighed nothing at all. Something heavy and warm settled around me — his coat, still dry on the inside, smelling of smoke and rain and something deeper underneath, something my wolf pressed her face into and would not let go of.

Boots pounded down the dock. Voices. Orders being given in a language of pure authority.

"Move. Everybody move. Petra, the estate. Now."

He carried me toward the black cars waiting at the end of the pier. His arms did not loosen. His eyes did not leave my face.

"I've got you," he said, quiet, only for me. "I've got you. Nothing touches you again."

I closed my eyes against his chest and let the dark take me a second time.

This time it was warm.