They let me out of the silver room on the sixth day, when the burn had scarred over into something the Healer could pretend was healed enough. My shoulder still pulled tight when I lifted my arm past a certain angle. I didn't mention it. Pain that stayed quiet was pain no one could use against me.

I went back to Omega duty the next morning — linen counting, an inventory no one checked twice — and that was where I first noticed him watching me.

Damon Cole didn't belong in the linen room. Betas didn't audit towels. But he stood in the doorway for the length of three folded sheets, arms crossed, his eyes tracking me with a kind of attention I hadn't felt from anyone in this pack house since before the Banquet — not pity, not contempt, something colder and more careful. Assessment.

"Omega Spencer," he said, using the title like it cost him something to say.

"Beta." I kept folding.

He didn't ask me anything. He didn't say anything else at all, actually — just stood there a moment longer, jaw tight, like a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the answer to, and then he was gone down the corridor without another word. I filed it the way I filed everything now. Not safe. Not yet dangerous. Watch it.

Louisa found me an hour later, trailing her usual pair of soft-eyed Omegas, her smile arranged like something she'd practiced in a mirror that morning.

"Jade." She never called me by rank when she wanted something to land harder as kindness. "Wonderful news. Alfonso — King Medina — has called a Pack Alliance summit. All the Eastern Seaboard packs. Jackson and I will represent Nightshade, of course." A pause, timed like a held breath before a blade. "And you'll be coming too. As service staff."

I didn't stop folding the sheet in my hands. "Service staff."

"Someone has to manage the linens, the trays, the small things." She tilted her head, and the jasmine came off her skin in a wave, sweet enough to make my back teeth ache. "I thought of you specifically. It felt — fitting."

There it was. Not an assignment. A parade. Every Alpha on the Eastern Seaboard would see what remained of the Phantom Pair's other half — barefoot in an apron, carrying trays for the woman who wore my mark now. Alfonso Medina, who had spent thirty years trying to erase my bloodline, would get to watch his instrument finish the job in public.

"I understand," I said.

Her smile widened a fraction, disappointed, I think, that I hadn't given her more to work with. "I knew you would."

She left with her ducklings trailing behind her, and I stood there with the sheet balled in my fists until my knuckles went white, and then I made myself fold it properly, corner to corner, because falling apart in a linen closet wasn't a luxury I could afford.

The night before we left, I sat on the floor of the Omega room with my back against the wall that didn't burn, and I didn't try to sleep.

It started the way it always did now — a low vibration behind my sternum, patient, familiar. I'd learned not to chase it, only to hold still and let it come to me on its own terms, the way you'd wait for a wild animal to decide you weren't a threat.

But tonight it didn't stop at vibration.

It gathered. It pressed. I felt it the way you feel weather change before the sky does anything about it — a pressure at the base of my skull, at the backs of my knees, in the marrow of both wrists. And then, impossibly, gently, I felt something press against the inside of my ribs. Not a paw. Not a claw. A forehead. The exact weight and warmth of a head laid against bone, patient and enormous and entirely mine.

I remember what we are.

It wasn't words. My wolf had never spoken to me in words — eleven years of wolfsbane-thinned blood had seen to that. But the sensation carried meaning the way scent carries memory, whole and immediate, no translation required. Something in me that had been folded small for over a decade was unfolding, slow enough not to break anything, patient enough to wait for permission I didn't know I was allowed to give.

I sat very still in the dark and let it happen.

I didn't cry. I didn't move. I pressed both palms flat against my own ribs like I could hold the shape of her there, keep her from receding the way she always had before, back into whatever silent place eleven years of suppression had built for her.

*Stay,* I told her, the way I'd told her *still here* a hundred times before, except this time it didn't feel like reassurance. It felt like a summons.

She didn't answer in words. She never would, not yet. But the pressure didn't leave. It sat behind my ribs all night, warm and coiled and waiting, and for the first time since the Banquet, I understood that whatever they thought they'd broken in me, they had only ever cracked open a door.

I didn't know yet what stood behind it.

I only knew, lying there in the dark with my hands on my own chest, that tomorrow I would walk into Alfonso Medina's summit wearing an apron and carrying trays, and something enormous and silver and furious would be walking in with me, folded so small no one in that room would think to look for her at all.