The grey uniform itched at my collar.

I'd worn it for three days now—the standard Omega servant's kit issued by the Silvercrest Pack for the regional Alpha summit. Grey cotton, no embellishment, a small silver pine embroidered on the breast pocket that marked me as temporary staff. Borrowed identity. I'd had worse.

I kept my hair down. Long enough to cover the scar on the left side of my neck, where a mark that should have meant everything had become something I hid from strangers. Not out of shame—I'd burned through shame somewhere around year four. Out of economy. Other people's reactions to it cost me energy I didn't have.

The summit hall was everything I wasn't. Crystal chandeliers, long tables draped in white linen, the air thick with the competing scents of a dozen pack hierarchies dressed in their best. Alphas moved through the room like weather systems—each one trailing their particular gravity, their Betas orbiting close, their Gammas stationed at the edges of the room with the careful stillness of men paid to look relaxed. I'd grown up knowing what a room full of Alphas felt like. I'd once walked into rooms like this as a Luna.

Now I carried trays through the service corridor and kept my eyes at chest height and counted the hours.

Fifteen months. That was how long Greta Voss had given Ella's wolf before the window closed permanently. Fifteen months, and that had been three months ago. I did the math every morning when I woke up. I did it again now, moving through the back hallway with a tray of crystal glasses balanced on my forearm, the numbers running quiet and relentless behind everything else.

I came around the corner and stopped.

Three people. A Beta I didn't recognize. A woman in a green silk dress with dark hair and a smile that had never once reached her eyes in all the years I'd known her.

And Enzo.

He was bigger than I remembered. Or maybe I'd just spent ten years making him smaller in my memory as a survival mechanism. Alpha Enzo Morrison, head of the Shadowpine Alliance—three packs now, I'd heard, which meant he'd spent the last decade doing exactly what Alphas do when they're not busy destroying their fated mates. Ascending. The grey at his temples was new. Everything else was the same: the jaw, the set of his shoulders, the way he occupied space like he'd been told the room was built for him and had never had reason to doubt it.

The faded remnant of what used to be our bond did what it always did when he was close. A spike of pain, dull and deep, somewhere behind my sternum. Not grief. Just damage. The difference between a wound and a scar is that scars don't hurt unless you press on them.

He was pressing on it simply by existing in the same hallway.

His eyes found me. Something moved through them—too fast to name, and I didn't try.

"Get the summit coordinators." His voice was the same. The alpha tone, that particular frequency that pressed on the back of your skull and made lesser wolves step back without deciding to. He wasn't looking at me anymore. He was looking at his Beta. "I want this—" a pause, just long enough to be deliberate, "—reassigned. No Omega with visible defects in any service rotation where attending Alphas can see them. It reflects on the hosting pack."

Damaged goods. He didn't say it. He didn't need to.

I lowered my gaze to the middle distance—a point on the wall just past his shoulder—and waited. The Beta moved off. Enzo moved past me without another word, close enough that the scent of pine and cold stone hit me like a physical thing, and I stood very still and breathed through my nose until my hands stopped wanting to shake.

Kendall didn't move past me.

She stopped. Tilted her head. The smile she gave me was the kind that looks, from a distance, like warmth.

"Sofia." My name in her mouth, the way it had always been. Like something she was setting down carefully before she stepped on it. "You look well."

I said nothing.

Her eyes moved over my face, my covered arms, the grey uniform. Taking inventory. Satisfied with what she found.

"Good luck with the rest of your shift," she said pleasantly, and followed Enzo down the corridor.

I stood there for another three seconds. Then I turned back the way I'd come, adjusted the tray, and kept walking.

The glasses didn't rattle. I made sure of that.

---

The formal dinner was worse.

I don't know how she arranged it—I never knew how Kendall arranged things, only that she always did. One of the summit coordinators found me in the service kitchen an hour before the meal and told me I'd been specifically requested for the Alpha table. A visiting Luna had asked for me by description. The coordinator said it like it was a compliment.

I thought about Ella. I thought about the number twelve. Twelve months left. I picked up the platter and went.

The Alpha table seated fourteen. I moved around it with the careful precision of someone who has learned to exist in hostile spaces—efficient, quiet, taking up as little room as possible. I set down the first course without incident. Refilled glasses. Retreated to the service position along the wall.

I saw Kendall's foot move. I saw it—and I was half a second too slow, and my ankle caught, and the tray went.

The sound of crystal hitting marble is very specific. It fills a room completely. Fourteen Alphas looked up.

I was already crouching, reaching for the largest pieces, when I heard Kendall's voice above me—that practiced, regretful tone she used when she wanted witnesses to believe she was being reasonable.

"Oh, how unfortunate. Someone get the Gamma to help her—she's bleeding on the good linen."

Two hands caught my arm. Not to help me up. The Gamma guard yanked my sleeve back to the elbow in one motion, and the room saw what was underneath: the rogue-claw scars that ran from my wrist to the inside of my elbow, white and deep and undeniable.

Kendall looked at them with something that almost resembled sorrow.

"A wolf who can't shift," she said, to no one in particular and everyone present, "is just meat walking around pretending it deserves a place at the table."

Some of the Alphas looked away. Some didn't.

I pressed my fingertips against the largest scar—a habit, a grounding—and gathered the remaining glass with my bare hands. A piece caught my palm. I didn't stop. I placed everything I could reach onto the tray, straightened, and walked out of the dining room without looking at Enzo.

I didn't need to look. I already knew what I'd find.

Nothing. Just a man watching someone else's problem solve itself.

---

The head housekeeper found me the next morning before I'd eaten.

"A complaint was filed," she said. She had the decency to look uncomfortable. "From a visiting Luna. You're being reassigned—kennel maintenance, back grounds. Half wages for the remainder of the summit."

I did the math. I always did the math.

"Understood," I said.

She left. I sat on the edge of the narrow cot in the Omega quarters and looked at my bandaged palm and ran the numbers one more time. Half wages for four days. What that left me. What that meant for Greta's payment. What that meant for the twelve months.

That night I opened the mind-link to Ella—thin and fragile as it was, the best I could manage without a wolf to anchor it—and felt her there, warm and steady and waiting.

*Mom. How's it going?*

"Fine," I said. "The work is fine. Everything's fine."

A pause. Ella had always been too perceptive for her own good. For my good.

*Okay,* she said finally. *I believe you.*

She didn't. We both knew it. But she let me have it, the way she always did—quietly, without making me pay for needing it.

I closed the link and sat in the dark for a long time, pressing my fingers against the scar on my arm, counting what I had left and what I still needed and how many more rooms like that one I could walk through before I ran out of ways to keep walking.

Greta Voss set her bag down on our kitchen table and didn't open it right away. That was how I knew.

She was a small woman, sixty-some years old, with hands that had gone permanently stained from decades of crushed root and bark. She'd been coming to us for six years, paid in installments I scraped together from whatever work would have me. She'd never once looked at me the way the housekeeper had, or the way Kendall had. She looked at me like a colleague. I'd learned to treasure that.

"How bad," I said. Not a question. I didn't have room left for questions that pretended not to know the answer.

Greta exhaled through her nose. "Her wolf's retreating faster than the last scan. I don't say that lightly, Sofia. I've been tracking the same signature for six years and it's never dropped like this." She finally opened the bag, pulled out a folded page covered in her small, careful handwriting — numbers, notes, the private language of a healer who didn't trust anyone else to read her results correctly. "Her sixteenth birthday is in eleven weeks. If her wolf hasn't stabilized by then, it doesn't come back. Ever. She'll register Omega for life. Or worse."

Rogue. She didn't say the word. She didn't have to.

I kept my hands flat on the table so they wouldn't shake. "What kind of intervention."

"Lycan-level healing. It's the only thing that reaches a fracture this deep — it's not herb work anymore, it's not even pack-healer work. I don't have the training and I don't have the access." She hesitated, and that hesitation told me there was more. "There's a healer two territories north who's treated fractured spirits before. Real results. But her fee—" Greta named a number that made the room go very quiet.

I did the math I always did. It didn't work. It hadn't worked in a decade.

Greta watched me do it. Then, carefully, like she was setting something breakable on a high shelf: "There's a gathering. Underground — Alphas operating outside pack law, on disputed ground near the old railyards. They pay Omega staff obscene money for one night's work. Cash, no records, no questions. The kind of money that gets you two territories north in eleven weeks instead of never."

"What's the catch."

"Discretion. Disposability." She met my eyes. "You don't ask what you see. You don't matter to them beyond what you're serving. I'm only telling you because I know what number you need and I don't see another way to get you there in time."

I didn't hesitate. Hesitating was a luxury for people with time.

"Give me the contact," I said.

---

The warehouse smelled like cold concrete and money — a strange combination, but I'd learned that money had a scent of its own, cologne and leather and something faintly metallic, like it wanted you to know it could buy anything, including silence.

My contact was a woman named Priya who'd once needed help when her own child ran a fever no pack healer would treat for free. She got me through the door and then disappeared into her own rotation, and I didn't see her again.

The rules were explained to me in under a minute. Servants knelt. Servants did not meet an Alpha's eyes. Servants existed as furniture that occasionally poured champagne. I nodded, took my tray, and knelt at the edge of the main floor with six other Omegas, my knees against bare concrete, my spine straight, my eyes fixed on the middle distance the way I'd trained myself to do a long time ago.

I thought about the number. Eleven weeks. I thought about Ella's laugh, the one that hadn't changed since she was six, and I let my hands stay steady on the silver tray while men who ruled entire territories laughed too loud and drank too much and didn't look at me twice.

It was almost peaceful, in its way. Almost.

Then I heard her voice.

"Well," Kendall said, somewhere above and behind me, pitched just loud enough to carry. "Isn't this a coincidence."

I didn't turn my head. Rule one. But I felt her circle around, felt Enzo's group somewhere near the bar, felt the particular quality of attention that gathered whenever Kendall decided a room needed watching.

She stopped in front of me. Champagne flute in hand, pale gold liquid catching the light.

"You know," she said, conversational, almost gentle, "I always did think you had lovely hands. Even now."

The glass slipped from her fingers.

It wasn't an accident. Nothing about Kendall was ever an accident. It shattered against the concrete an arm's length from my knees, fragments scattering bright and small across the floor between us, and the sound cut through every conversation in the warehouse the way I'd known crystal on marble could.

Heads turned. Alphas turned.

Kendall crouched, just slightly, so her voice would land soft and cruel and perfectly audible.

"Pick it up," she said. "On your hands and knees. Earn your scraps like the Omega you are."

Somewhere behind her, a low ripple of laughter started — Alphas, glasses lifting, already enjoying the show.