The mark on my neck had been humming for ninety-eight nights, and on the ninety-ninth, at some hour past midnight, it finally screamed.

I woke to it before I woke to anything else — a hot wire dragged under my skin, pulling toward the door. That was how the bond worked when it was starving. It didn't ache where he touched me. It ached where he didn't.

His footsteps came down the hall a moment later. Unhurried. Familiar enough that I didn't need to open my eyes to know the weight of his stride, or the door he'd pass without slowing — mine.

But I knew something else now, something my body had learned before my mind caught up: his scent had changed. Cedar and rain-soaked earth, that used to be only his, now carried something underneath it, threaded so deep it had stopped being separate. Vanilla and crushed jasmine. Cataleya's wolf, worn on his skin like a second coat.

I got up.

The corridor was cold under my bare feet. I stepped into his path before he reached the stairs, and he stopped short, jaw tightening, eyes sliding somewhere over my shoulder instead of at my face.

"Come inside," I said. Not a question. Not a plea. Just a door, held open.

"Paige." My name, said like a warning.

"You've walked past that door ninety-nine times, Franco."

His eyes finally found mine — and I watched something in them harden, right before his voice dropped into the register that wasn't a voice anymore. It was pressure. Alpha tone, aimed at his own mate.

"Enough."

The word landed on my chest like a hand shoving me back. My knees buckled half an inch before I caught the wall. Somewhere under my ribs, my wolf — thin, starved, quiet for months — flinched like something struck.

"It's a fractured bond," he said, fast, rehearsed, the way a man recites something he's said so many times it no longer costs him anything. "A condition. Rare. My wolf needs hers to stay stable, Paige, you know this—"

"I don't know this." My voice came out steady even as my mark burned white-hot. "You've never shown me proof. You've only ever told me."

"A true Luna would understand sacrifice." He said it like a gift he was handing me, wrapped in scripture. Then he turned and walked, and the sound of his footsteps down the stairs was the loudest thing in the house.

I pressed two fingers to the mark and felt it — not fading, not settling, but pulsing with a low, furious growl that wasn't mine. My wolf, awake for the first time in months. Not submitting. Snarling. *He is lying.*

The bond was supposed to be a bridge. I understood, standing there in the dark hallway with my fingers on my own throat, that it had become a leash instead — and I was the only one wearing it.

The next morning I went to the archive room. Ledgers, alliance records, nothing anyone would question a Luna touching. Behind the border correspondence, sealed in wax I'd never had the courage to break, was the letter my mother sent me the year before she died. I had told myself I wasn't ready. I was ready now.

One page. Her handwriting, careful and slanted. *Your blood is Lycan, Paige. Royal line, buried three generations back on my side. If you ever need proof, ever need protection no pack Alpha can override — find Prince Onyx of the Lycan court. He will know you by scent. He cannot be lied to about this.*

I folded it into the ledger and told no one.

That evening I found the old mind-link thread my mother had shown me once, half-forgotten, rooted in a pack that no longer existed. I reached, and I did not ask to be saved. *I am Paige Evans. My mother was Elena Evans. I need to know how a wolf with suppressed Alpha-blood survives prolonged wolfsbane exposure and a bond being used against her.*

Onyx answered within the hour. Calm, precise, a stranger's voice that felt steadier than my mate's had in months. I burned the scent suppressant I'd stolen from the infirmary before the residue could settle, and I went back to my ledger like nothing had moved.

Three days later, Cataleya appeared in my doorway.

She didn't speak. She didn't need to. The dress she wore was Luna ceremonial silk, pulled straight from the storehouse reserved for me, and she let me look long enough to understand exactly what she was wearing before she turned and walked away, unhurried, humming.

My wolf surged up my spine with a snarl so violent it nearly cracked my face open.

I pressed my fingers to the mark, steadied my breath, and opened the ledger to a clean page.

I wrote the date. Then: *Ceremonial gown. Storehouse. Cataleya Ramirez.*

I kept writing.

The rogues came at dusk, when half the pack was still at the supper tables and the eastern wing was full of sleeping pups.

I smelled the smoke before I heard the first scream. Something chemical under the burn — they'd used accelerant, which meant this wasn't a hungry raid. It was planned. I dropped my ledger on the table and ran.

The eastern corridor was already a throat of orange light. Heat pushed against my face like a wall. Somewhere above me, on the second landing, a woman was shouting for her son, and the sound of it went straight through my ribs.

"The stairs are clear!" I shouted. "Bring them down the main stairs, the west route is blocked!"

I took the steps two at a time. The wood was hot through my shoes. Halfway up, I could see them — three of our older wolves and a girl no older than nine, huddled at the top where the smoke was thinnest, coughing, frozen by the wall of flame eating the banister.

"Come to me," I called. "Come to my voice, keep low—"

"PAIGE. STOP."

The Alpha tone hit me like a truck.

It didn't feel like a voice. It felt like a hand closing around every muscle I owned and squeezing until my body stopped belonging to me. My foot came down on the step and stayed there. My hand, reaching up, locked in the air. I tried to turn my head and couldn't. I tried to breathe and only managed a thin whistle of smoke-choked air.

Inside me, my wolf threw herself against the command like a bird against glass. Once. Twice. Nothing. She was too thin, too starved, too quiet from months of being ignored. She had no weight left to push back with.

I could still see. That was the cruelty of it. The Moon Goddess let me keep my eyes.

Through the flames, a side door banged open, and Franco came through it.

He had Cataleya in his arms. She had one hand curled against his chest and her face tucked into his neck, and he had his whole body turned to shield her from the heat — his shoulder taking the flames, his back curved over her like a roof. He was beautiful doing it. That was the part I would remember. My mate was beautiful, saving someone.

He looked up.

He saw me. Frozen on the burning staircase with my hand still in the air.

His jaw clenched — that tell, that stupid little tell I knew better than my own heartbeat — and then he turned his head and carried her out the door.

Our warriors came pounding through after him. Derek Voss. Two Deltas from the border unit. A young one whose name I'd written into the pack roll myself. They ran past me. One of them looked. He looked right at me, and his eyes went wide, and he kept running.

The beam came down three feet to my left. The heat of it slapped my face and the sparks went up my legs and I couldn't move, I couldn't scream, I couldn't do anything but stand there and smell my own skin.

Somewhere above me, the older wolves got the girl out through the roof hatch. I heard them go. Good. That was good. I held onto that.

The command broke maybe ninety seconds later, when Franco got far enough away that it thinned. My body came back to me all at once and I went down hard on the stairs, and then I crawled — hands first, dragging my legs behind me, each step of the descent scraping burnt cloth into burnt flesh.

I got as far as the doorway before somebody finally picked me up.

---

Sofia Marsh cut my ruined slacks off with shears and didn't say a word for a long time.

Ankle to thigh. Both legs. She laid the cooling gel on in strips and her hands were shaking so badly she had to stop twice and press them flat against the table.

"Weeks," she said finally. "Luna, this is — weeks. Maybe longer, with your wolf as low as it is." She swallowed. "Your healing rate is barely above human right now. I don't understand it."

"I understand it," I said.

She looked up then, and I saw the exact moment she decided not to ask. Her eyes went back to the dressings and stayed there.

Derek Voss appeared in the doorway around midnight. Gamma of the Ironclad Pack, soot still in his hair, a burn across his forearm he hadn't bothered to treat. He stood there with his mouth half open. I watched him find the words and lose them and find them again.

"Luna, I—"

"Goodnight, Derek."

He left. He didn't come back.

When the infirmary went dark, I pulled the suppressant cloth from under my pillow and pressed it to the inside of my wrist, where the mind-link residue would settle first.

Then I reached.

*Rogue attack. Eastern wing. He used the Alpha tone to hold me on the stairs while he carried her out. Warriors ran past me. Both legs, ankle to thigh.*

Onyx answered in under a minute, and his voice in my head was so calm it made my eyes sting.

*Document everything. Names of every wolf who witnessed it. The exact wording of the command. Have the healer put the burn severity in writing tonight, before anyone thinks to ask her not to.*

A pause.

*I am preparing a formal record on my end. Do not move yet, Paige.*

I lay in the dark with my legs on fire and my mark ice-cold, and I started counting names.

Seventeen wolves saw me on those stairs.

I wrote down every single one.

By the second week, the pain in my legs had dulled into something I could live inside of, like a room I'd learned the shape of in the dark. Sofia changed the dressings twice a day and stopped flinching when she peeled them back. I counted that as progress. I counted a lot of small things as progress now, because the big things had stopped being mine to count.

Cataleya came on a Tuesday. I knew her step before I saw her — light, unhurried, the tap of a woman who had never once in her life needed to move fast for anyone. She didn't knock. She never knocked anymore.

"You look better," she said, and smiled like she meant it.

I didn't answer. I'd learned that silence cost her more than words did.

She pulled the visitor chair close to the bed, closer than comfort allowed, and sat down with her phone already in her hand, thumb moving before she even looked at me. "I thought you'd want to see something," she said. "For your records. You're so good with records."

She turned the screen toward me.

Two wolves, moonlit, running through a tree line I didn't recognize. One dark and broad-shouldered, one sleek and pale — flank pressed to flank, close enough that their fur blurred together in the frame. I knew the dark one's gait before I let myself know anything else. I'd watched that same body move through a thousand mornings of my life.

"Neighboring territory," Cataleya said, pleasant as a weather report. "Franco likes to run when his wolf gets restless. I keep him company." She swiped to the next photo. Same tree line, different angle, her wolf's head tucked briefly against his throat. "This one's timestamped. Look at the corner."

I looked.

The date sat small and gray in the corner of the frame, and my whole body went still around it, the way water goes still right before it freezes solid. That night. The night I'd woken alone in the Luna quarters with cramping low in my belly and blood soaking through the sheets before I understood what was happening, before I understood that I was losing something I hadn't even told the pack existed yet. I had called for him. I remembered that clearly — my own voice, thin and useless, calling a name into an empty room.

She swiped again.

Another night. Another timestamp. This one I didn't need to calculate. I'd had that date memorized since the healer who wasn't ours, the one my mother's pack had sent because our own healer was too far, had called me at dawn to say Elena Evans had stopped breathing sometime before sunrise, alone, with no one beside her but a nurse she'd never met.

Both times. He had been running with her both times.

Cataleya watched my face the way a scientist watches an experiment — patient, curious, waiting for the exact moment the reaction started. I could feel her wanting it. I could feel how badly she needed to see something break open in me so she could carry the memory of it around like a coin in her pocket.

I gave her nothing.

Under the blanket, out of her sight, I pressed my nails into the mark on my neck until the skin split and I tasted copper somewhere at the back of my throat, sharp and grounding. The pain gave me a place to stand. I held her eyes over the top of the phone until the silence stretched long enough that it became hers to carry instead of mine.

She looked away first. Just barely. Just a flicker toward the window before she caught herself and smiled again, thinner this time, and slid the phone back into her pocket like she'd decided the show wasn't landing the way she'd hoped.

"Rest well, Luna," she said, and left the way she'd come — unhurried, humming something under her breath that I didn't recognize and didn't want to.

I waited until her footsteps faded down the corridor. Then I reached under my pillow for the suppressant vial and pressed the cloth against my wrist, and I opened the channel.

*The fractured bond was never real,* I told Onyx, once I'd laid out the timestamps, the dates, the two nights that belonged to my mother and my pup and no one else. *He simply chose her. The lie was the leash.*

His answer came slower than usual, like he was choosing each word with a blade instead of a pen. *I know. And now we have enough to begin. When you are ready, I will come for you — but the timing is yours.*

I closed the channel and lay in the dark a long time before I reached for the ledger on the nightstand.

I wrote my mother's name at the top of a clean page, and under it, the date. I wrote the second date beneath it, and left a line of space where a name should have gone, because I had never let myself choose one, and grief didn't need a name to be counted.

Then I turned to a fresh page, and I started planning.