Three weeks after I walked out of Ironvale, I stood in front of a pack-house I'd never seen before and told a lie I'd practiced in the mirror.

"I'm wolfless," I said. "I can cook."

The woman across the intake desk had warm brown skin and tired eyes. Her name badge read Mara Okafor, Head Healer. She looked at me for a long moment—long enough that I wondered if she could smell the wolfsbane still leaching out of my pores—then wrote something on a form and slid it toward me.

"Name?"

"Sav," I said.

She waited. When I didn't continue, she clicked her pen twice and wrote it down. Just that. Sav. No surname. No pack lineage. No history.

"Kitchen work starts at five a.m.," Mara said. "You'll bunk in the east wing, third floor. Omegas only. Don't wander."

"I won't," I said.

She handed me a key attached to a wooden tag with the number 3-E carved into it. As I turned to go, her voice stopped me.

"Sav."

I looked back.

Her gaze was steady. Clinical. "If you need medical attention, you come to me. Not the pack physician. Me."

I nodded. I didn't ask why. I already knew she'd seen something—the faint scarring around my irises, maybe, or the way my hands shook when I signed the intake form. Wolfsbane left marks if you took it long enough. I had taken it for three years.

The cot in 3-E was narrow and clean. I lay down on it fully dressed and stared at the ceiling until the sky outside went dark. My wolf was still there, pressed against the inside of my ribs like a prisoner testing the bars. She didn't speak. She hadn't spoken since the altar. But I could feel her—restless, grieving, furious in a way that had nowhere to go.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember my mother's face. The bond-shock had taken her so fast I hadn't gotten to say goodbye. Hadn't gotten to tell her I was sorry for bringing a mate like Nicholas into our lives. Hadn't gotten to ask if she'd known, somehow, that I wasn't really wolfless—just broken.

Sleep didn't come. At four-thirty I gave up and went downstairs.

The kitchen was industrial and gleaming, all stainless steel and fluorescent light. A middle-aged woman with flour on her apron looked up when I walked in.

"You the new Omega?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good. Prep station's in the back. We've got a guest upstairs—Lycan royalty, so don't screw it up." She jerked her chin toward a cutting board already laid out with vegetables. "Start with those."

I tied an apron around my waist and got to work.

My hands knew what to do. They always had. Cooking was the one thing that still made sense—the methodical rhythm of chopping, the heat of the stove, the way ingredients became something else if you paid attention. I worked through the morning prep in silence, and when the supervisor asked if anyone could handle the guest meal, I raised my hand before I could think better of it.

"You sure?" she asked. "It's got to be perfect."

"I'm sure," I said.

She handed me the menu card. Rosemary-roasted lamb. Warm bread. A broth base I recognized from a recipe my mother used to make on cold nights, back when we still had cold nights that felt safe.

I started cooking.

The rosemary went in first. I crushed it between my palms and the scent rose up sharp and green, cutting through the grease-smell of the industrial kitchen. My wolf stirred. Not much. Just enough that I felt her shift against my bones, restless.

I kept going. Lamb in the pan, seared hard, the fat crisping at the edges. Bread dough kneaded smooth, left to rise under a damp cloth. The broth simmering low and slow, the way my mother had taught me—patience, she'd said, was the only real skill in cooking. Everything else was just following instructions.

By the time I plated it, my hands had stopped shaking.

The supervisor inspected the tray, nodded once, and handed it to a server. "Guest quarters, top floor. Don't drop it."

I watched the tray disappear through the double doors and felt something loosen in my chest. Not relief. Just the small, quiet satisfaction of having made something that wouldn't hurt anyone.

I scrubbed the pots alone after the dinner rush. The kitchen had emptied out, the other Omegas gone to their bunks or the common room. I didn't mind. Alone was easier. Alone didn't ask questions.

I was elbow-deep in soapy water when the kitchen doors slammed open.

A man stood in the doorway. Tall, broad-shouldered, with silver-grey eyes that locked onto me like a sniper finding a target. His aura hit the room half a second later—Lycan, unmistakable, so thick with authority that my knees almost buckled.

Behind him, a second man—leaner, stone-faced, with the controlled violence of a trained enforcer.

"You," the first man said. His voice was low and rough, like he'd been holding it back. "You cooked the meal."

It wasn't a question.

I set the pot down carefully. Dried my hands on my apron. "Yes."

He crossed the kitchen in four strides. Stopped two feet away. Close enough that I could see the way his jaw was locked, the way his hands were clenched at his sides like he was physically holding himself in place.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Sav."

"Your full name."

I hesitated. His eyes narrowed.

"Just Sav," I said.

He stared at me. I stared back. I had practice at this—at making myself small, at giving nothing away. Three years with Nicholas had taught me how to disappear while standing in plain sight.

But this man didn't look away.

"You're coming with me," he said.

The enforcer stepped forward. I took a step back, my spine hitting the edge of the sink.

"I didn't do anything wrong," I said. My voice came out steady. That surprised me.

"I know," the man said. Then, quieter, almost to himself: "I know."

He turned to the enforcer. "Cole. Clear the hall. No one follows."

Cole nodded once and disappeared.

The man looked back at me. His eyes were still locked on mine, but something in them had shifted—less predator, more... something I didn't have a name for.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said.

I didn't believe him. But I also didn't have a choice.

I untied my apron. Set it on the counter. Followed him out of the kitchen into the hallway, where every instinct I had left was screaming at me to run.

Cole was waiting outside the kitchen door when I came out to empty the grease trap.

He didn't knock. Didn't clear his throat. Just stood there in the hallway with his arms crossed and his face arranged into the particular blankness of someone who delivers orders for a living and has stopped noticing whether people want to receive them.

"Prince Grayson requests your presence," he said. "Guest sitting room. Now."

I looked at him for a moment. His aura was Lycan—dense and controlled, the kind that pressed against the edges of a room without announcing itself. Not aggressive. Just permanent, like load-bearing stone.

I glanced down at the dish towel in my hands. Still damp. I folded it once, set it on the counter behind me, and followed him.

Not because I had to. I knew, technically, that an Omega could decline a summons from a guest. Technically. But I also knew what declining would mean—a conversation with the pack steward, questions I couldn't answer, a close look at paperwork that didn't quite hold up. I had been here three weeks. I had not yet made myself invisible enough to survive scrutiny.

So I walked.

The guest sitting room was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor that smelled of cedar and old wool. Cole opened the door and stepped aside. I walked in holding nothing, which suddenly felt like a mistake—I should have brought something, a tray, a reason to be there that wasn't just myself.

Grayson was standing at the window.

He turned the moment I crossed the threshold. And then he went completely still.

Not the stillness of surprise. Something deeper than that. The stillness of a man who has been holding his breath for a very long time and has just, without warning, found the air.

I stopped three feet inside the door.

Neither of us spoke. He just looked at me, and I looked back, and the silence stretched out long enough that I became aware of my own heartbeat.

"Your name," he said finally. His voice was low. Careful, in a way that didn't match the size of him.

"Sav."

"Your full name."

"Just Sav."

He absorbed that without pushing. His eyes moved over my face—not the way men usually looked at women, cataloguing and assessing. More like he was trying to place something. Like he'd seen a photograph once and was now standing in front of the actual building.

"Were you near the eastern Ironvale border," he said, "seventeen years ago? During a rogue raid."

The question hit me like cold water thrown flat against my chest.

I was seven seventeen years ago. I had no memory of a rogue raid. I had almost no memories of being seven at all—just fragments, mostly kitchen smells and my mother's voice and the particular quality of afternoon light through a window I couldn't place.

But something happened when he asked. Something in my chest. My wolf—who had been quiet since the ceremony, since the altar, since the moment I pressed my bloodied thumb to that parchment—stirred. Not the furious, grief-blind thrashing from before. Something warmer. Something almost like recognition.

I did not let it show.

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

His jaw tightened slightly. He believed me, I thought. He just didn't like it.

"You cooked the meal tonight."

"Yes."

"The rosemary." He said it like it meant something specific. "Where did you learn that combination?"

"My mother taught me."

The word mother landed in the room with more weight than I intended. I felt it. He felt it too—I could see it in the small shift of his expression, the way something behind his eyes went careful and quiet.

I took a step back toward the door. "If that's all—"

"It's not."

"I have an early start," I said. "The kitchen opens at five."

He didn't move to stop me. But his eyes held mine for one more second, and in that second there was something I recognized without wanting to—the look of a person who has found something they thought was gone and is terrified of moving too fast.

I knew that look. I had worn it for three years.

I left before he could say anything else.

Back in 3-E, I sat on the edge of my cot and pressed both hands flat against my sternum. My wolf was still there, warm and restless, pressing back.

I didn't understand it. I didn't understand any of it—the question about the border, the way he'd looked at me, the way my own body had responded to a stranger's voice like it remembered something my mind didn't.

I lay back and stared at the ceiling.

Somewhere in this building, a Lycan Prince was asking questions I couldn't answer.

And somewhere in my chest, something I'd spent three years trying to kill was quietly, stubbornly, refusing to stay dead.

He came back the next morning.

I was at the prep station, quartering onions, when I heard the door. I didn't look up. I had learned, in Ironvale, that looking up invited conversation, and conversation invited questions, and questions led to places I couldn't afford to go.

But I knew it was him. The aura was unmistakable—that dense, quiet pressure, like weather moving in from the north. Not aggressive. Just there.

He pulled out the stool on the opposite side of the prep table and sat down.

I kept chopping.

"What are you making?" he asked.

"Stock."

"For?"

"Lunch service."

He was quiet for a moment. "What goes in it?"

I glanced up, just briefly. He was watching my hands, not my face. There was something almost careful about it—like he'd decided that looking at my face directly was too much, too fast, and had found a compromise.

"Onion," I said. "Carrot. Celery. Bay leaf if we have it. Bones if the butcher came through."

"Did he?"

"Not yet."

Grayson nodded like this was important information. I went back to chopping.

He came back the morning after that. And the morning after that. He always sat at the same stool, always asked about the food, and I always answered in the shortest sentences I could manage. It should have felt like pressure. It didn't. It felt like—I didn't have a word for it. Like someone sitting with you in a waiting room. Not asking you to perform. Just there.

On the third morning, I made congee. Simple, nothing special—just rice cooked long and slow with ginger and a little sesame oil. I ladled a bowl for the staff breakfast tray and set it on the counter.

Grayson looked at it. Then at me.

"You're not eating," he said.

"I ate earlier."

I hadn't. He seemed to know that. He didn't argue. He just reached across the prep table, took a second bowl from the stack, and ladled it himself. Set it beside mine—beside the bowl I hadn't touched yet, the one I'd told myself I'd get to when the morning rush slowed down.

He didn't say anything. Didn't look at me with the particular expression people use when they're waiting to be thanked.

I stared at the bowl for a moment.

Then I picked up a spoon and ate.

It was warm. That was the first thing I noticed—actually warm, not just technically above room temperature. I had been eating cold food for three weeks because I kept forgetting to sit down before it cooled.

I didn't say thank you. I wasn't sure I could without my voice doing something embarrassing. But I ate the whole bowl, and when I set the spoon down, Grayson was looking at the window with the careful neutrality of someone pretending not to have noticed.

That was when the kitchen door swung open and Barnaby came in.

He was not supposed to be inside. I had been feeding him scraps at the back step for two weeks—a small grey pup with one torn ear and the general attitude of someone who had been wronged by the universe and intended to remember it. He was not friendly. He tolerated me because I fed him. He had snapped at two other kitchen workers who tried to touch him.

He trotted across the tile floor, sniffed Grayson's boot once, and rolled onto his back.

All four paws in the air. Belly completely exposed. The posture of total, unconditional trust.

I stared.

Grayson looked down at the pup for a moment. Then he reached down and scratched Barnaby's stomach with two fingers, slow and easy, like he'd been doing it for years.

Barnaby's tail beat against the floor.

I realized my mouth was open. I closed it.

"He doesn't do that," I said.

"Apparently he does."

"He snapped at the sous chef."

"The sous chef is nervous," Grayson said. "Dogs know."

I didn't have an answer for that. I picked up my bowl and carried it to the sink, mostly so I had something to do with my hands.

---

Mara's exam room smelled like calendula and antiseptic. She had me lie flat on the table and pressed two fingers just below my ribs, moving in slow deliberate circles.

I watched the ceiling.

"Here," she said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"And here?"

"Yes."

She was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I started counting the ceiling tiles.

"This is wolfsbane scarring," she said. "Stomach lining, lower esophagus. Consistent with prolonged ingestion." She paused. "Not accidental."

My hands were in my lap. I made them stay still.

"How long?" she asked.

I looked at the ceiling. "Long enough."

She didn't push. She pulled her stethoscope off and set it on the tray beside her with a small, precise click.

"The damage is partially reversible," she said. "Consistent nutrition. No further exposure. Time." She looked at me directly. "I need you to eat three meals a day. Real meals. Not scraps between shifts."

I thought about the bowl of congee that morning. The second bowl, placed without comment beside mine.

"Okay," I said.

"I need you to promise me."

The word landed differently than I expected. Not a command. A request. The kind that assumed I was someone worth asking.

I sat up slowly. "I promise," I said.

Mara nodded once. Then she handed me a small glass of water and watched, without apology, until I drank it.

I walked back to the kitchen the long way, through the east corridor, past the window that looked out over the back yard where the delivery trucks came in. The afternoon light was flat and grey. Rain coming, probably.

At the far end of the corridor, near the utility stairs, I noticed Declan Hurst leaning against the wall with his phone out. He was one of the lower-ranked Deltas—I'd seen him around the pack house but never spoken to him. He glanced up when I passed.

Something about the way he looked at me made my wolf shift.

Not recognition. Not aggression. Just—attention. The specific quality of attention that meant someone was tracking where you went.

I kept walking. Didn't change my pace.

But I noted it. Filed it away in the part of me that had learned, in three years of living with Nicholas, that the people who watched you quietly were more dangerous than the ones who made noise.