The storm hit at midnight.

I knew because Maverick told me through the wall, his voice low and urgent. "Thunder's shorting the perimeter sensors. We go now."

My legs felt like water. The wolfsbane had hollowed me out, left me a shell, and my wolf was nothing but a weak flicker somewhere deep inside my chest. But I stood. I pressed my palm flat to the wall one last time, and I nodded even though he couldn't see me.

"Ready," I whispered.

Something slammed against his cell door. Once. Twice. On the third hit, metal screamed, and I heard the groan of a frame giving way. Then footsteps in the hall. The lock on my door clicked, and the door swung open.

Maverick stood in the frame.

I'd pictured him a hundred ways. None of them were this.

He was mid-shift—half-transformed, caught between man and wolf. Black fur ran down one side of his face and chest. His left arm had elongated into something clawed and brutal. His jaw was wrong, teeth too long, lips pulled back in a snarl. Blood streamed from his shoulder where the partial shift had torn through his own muscle, and his silver eyes burned through the dim light like coins at the bottom of a well.

"Run," he rasped.

I ran.

The hallway blurred. A guard came around the corner and Maverick hit him so hard the man's body folded. The second guard got off one shout before Maverick's claws silenced him. I didn't look. I kept moving, my bare feet slapping concrete, following the map he'd whispered through the wall for weeks.

Left. Right. Down three flights. The drainage grate was already pried open, metal teeth bent back where he'd clearly worked at it over months with nothing but his hands.

I dropped into the tunnel first. Ankle-deep water, black and freezing. Maverick landed behind me with a grunt of pain. I turned to help him and he waved me off.

"Go," he growled. "Keep going."

We ran through the dark. I couldn't see anything. I could only hear his ragged breathing behind me and the slap of water around my shins. My wolf was silent. Dead silent. I'd never missed her more than I did in that tunnel, feeling my way through pitch black like a human.

The tunnel ended at a rusted grate half-swallowed by mud. Maverick tore it loose with his half-shifted arm, and then we were out.

The woods swallowed us. Rain came down in sheets, cold enough to steal breath. Lightning cracked somewhere behind us and lit the trees in blue-white flashes. I kept running until my lungs burned, until my legs gave out, until Maverick caught me by the elbow and pulled me behind a fallen pine.

He'd shifted back. Mostly. His face was human again, pale and bloodied. But the wound on his shoulder was bad—a wet, red tear where his own transformation had ripped him open.

I pressed my hands against it without thinking.

And something happened.

A spark, faint as a struck match, somewhere deep behind my ribs. Not my wolf. Something older. Something that recognized the warmth of his blood under my palms and *leaned toward it.*

I yanked my hands back like I'd been burned.

Maverick's eyes found mine through the rain. He didn't say anything. But I saw it—the way his pupils blew wide, the way his nostrils flared like he was catching a scent through the storm.

"We need to move," I said quickly.

He nodded once. We moved.

---

The safehouse was a sagging two-room cabin on the edge of a town I didn't know the name of. Maverick had contacts, apparently. People who owed him favors older than my imprisonment. A woman with grey braids opened the door, took one look at us, and shoved us inside without a word.

It was there, by the woodstove, wrapped in a blanket that still smelled faintly of someone else's pack, that Maverick told me who he was.

"Lycan Prince," he said. Flat. Matter-of-fact. "Son of King Roger. He locked me away because I wouldn't mate the woman he picked for his dynasty."

I stared at him. I should have been shocked. I wasn't. Nothing surprised me anymore.

"Then help me," I said. "Help me go through the Council. Formally. On the record."

He studied me a long moment. "Alora, the Council isn't—"

"I have the footage. I have my account. I'm the Luna of Shadowcrest, and my mother was murdered because of Delaney. The regional Alpha Council has to hear this."

He exhaled slowly. Then he nodded. "All right. We'll file."

We filed within forty-eight hours. Maverick's fringe contacts walked the paperwork into the regional seat themselves. The execution video. My sworn statement. Timestamps, mind-link logs, every piece of evidence I could still prove existed.

I slept that night for the first time in months. Really slept.

---

I should have known better.

The response came three days later, and it wasn't a hearing date. It was a formal notice: *Grievance tabled pending further review of material credibility.*

Maverick read it over my shoulder. His jaw tightened.

Then the dossiers started leaking.

Every allied pack on the eastern seaboard received the same package. Doctored medical records. Fabricated statements from Shadowcrest healers. Photographs of me looking wild-eyed and gaunt—easy enough to produce, since Greyhaven had made me look exactly like that. The language was surgical. *Unstable. Wolfsbane-addled. Rogue-sympathizing. A grieving she-wolf who fabricated evidence to slander her Alpha's trusted advisor.*

Dereck's Beta had moved faster than I had.

I sat at the cabin's little table and read the smear sheet twice. Then I set it down very carefully, because my hands were shaking too hard to hold it.

"The system protects its own," Maverick said quietly behind me. "I warned you."

"I thought the truth would be enough."

"It isn't. Not against an Alpha with reputation and a Beta with reach." He crouched beside my chair, his silver eyes level with mine. "We need Delaney to condemn herself, Alora. Out of her own mouth. On a recording no one can edit."

I looked down at my hands. At the faint silver streaks the wolfsbane had left in my skin.

"Then that's what we'll get," I said.