The sixty-eighth morning smells the same as the sixty-seventh.

Floral. Heavy. Hers.

I press the cloth against the baseboard and drag it slow, working the scent out of the grout the way I've learned to — not fast, not angry, just steady. Colette Patterson wears jasmine oil, the cheap kind that clings to fabric and skin and stone. It layers over Killian's musk like a second coat of paint, and after three years of this, I know exactly how long it takes to scrub down to wood.

Forty minutes. Give or take.

I'm on my knees in my own mate's suite at six in the morning, and my hands don't shake. That's the thing no one understands about me. They never have.

"You've missed a spot."

I don't look up. I already heard her bare feet on the floor — she walks heel-first, deliberate, the way women do when they want to be heard. Colette is standing in the doorway wearing Killian's shirt, the collar hanging loose off one shoulder, a coffee mug cradled in both hands like she owns the morning.

She crouches down to my eye level. Her smile is the patient kind, the kind that means she has time.

"Does it bother you?" she asks, almost soft. "The smell. Has the wolfless Luna learned to enjoy it yet?"

I keep scrubbing.

She waits three seconds for an answer she already knows she won't get, then straightens, and her laughter trails down the hallway like smoke.

I finish the baseboard. I wring the cloth out over the bucket. I do not allow myself the small luxury of imagining what her face will look like in thirty days.

Not yet.

---

The morning assembly gathers in the main hall at eight — three hundred wolves arranged in loose rank, the air thick with pack-scent and the particular charged quiet that means Killian is already in the room.

He descends the stairs with Colette on his arm. She's changed into her own clothes now, something fitted and cream-colored, her dark hair loose. She knows how to make an entrance. I'll give her that.

I stand at my place to the left of the dais, hands folded, eyes forward. The Luna's position. The one I've held for seven years.

Killian doesn't look at me until he wants to.

When he does, his voice drops into the Alpha tone — that low, resonant command that bypasses thought and goes straight to bone — and my body answers before my mind can argue.

*Down.*

My knees hit the stone floor. My palms flatten. My spine bows, throat bared, the posture of total submission forced out of my own muscles while I watch from somewhere behind my eyes, perfectly calm, perfectly furious.

The hall goes silent.

His hand catches me across the face — open-palmed, not a fist, which somehow makes it worse. The crack of it echoes. My lip splits at the corner and I taste copper.

"The state of my suite," he says to the room, not to me, "is an embarrassment."

I keep my eyes on the floor. The stone is cold through my knees. Ansel, standing two rows back, has gone very still — I can see his boots from here, and they haven't moved.

"Colette Patterson," Killian continues, his voice carrying easily now, smooth and certain, "will be marked as co-Luna within the month. The Concubine Rite will be observed in full."

The murmur that moves through the pack is low, careful. Nobody cheers. Nobody objects.

I stay bowed until he dismisses me with a flick of his hand, and I rise the way I always do — quietly, without drama, blood drying at the corner of my mouth — and I walk out.

---

The healer's cellar is mine between midnight and dawn. No one else comes here.

I light a single candle and take the last bottle from the shelf behind the loose stone — pale green glass, the moonflower tonic I've brewed in secret for three years, the only thing standing between Killian Scott and the silverblight rotting through his blood. The same rot that killed his sixty-seventh mistress. The same rot he earned.

I hold it over the drain.

One breath.

Not mercy. Never mercy. Just the weight of knowing that once I pour it, the clock starts, and clocks don't negotiate.

I pour.

The pale liquid spirals down and disappears, and the smell of moonflower — clean, faintly sweet — rises once and then it's gone.

I pick up the nail I keep on the shelf beside the candle and scratch a single mark into the cellar wall.

Day One.

Then I go upstairs to the attic, pull Selah Cox's journal from behind the water cistern, and carry it back down to the cellar table. I lay it open beside my own coded log — three years of blood test results, tonic batch records, the dates I first noticed the tremor in Killian's left hand. I work through the cross-references methodically, the way I do everything: the rogue trade link, the silverblight chain, every woman he marked and discarded before Colette came along thinking she was something different.

It all holds. Every line of it.

I wrap both documents in oilcloth and press them under the cellar floor, between the third and fourth stones from the east wall.

I allow myself one full minute of stillness in the dark.

Then I blow out the candle and go upstairs to begin the day — because somewhere in the pack house above me, Killian Scott is already brewing my morning tea.

Two days after the Concubine Rite announcement, Colette calls a Luna's challenge in the training circle, and she does it loud enough for the whole pack to hear.

"I invoke the old right," she says, chin lifted, voice pitched to carry. "Trial by circle. Let the pack see which of us is fit to wear the title."

It's not a real challenge. Everyone knows that. A Luna's challenge is supposed to settle a dispute between equals, and Colette isn't my equal — she's a mistress dressed in borrowed scent, testing how far the ground under her has shifted. But Killian likes the spectacle of it. He settles onto the dais bench with a cup of something dark and watches me the way he watches everything now, like I'm a piece of furniture that occasionally surprises him by moving.

"Granted," he says, and the word lands like a coin tossed for entertainment.

The pack forms a ring around the packed dirt. Colette strips out of her robe without ceremony, already smug, already certain, and shifts. Her grey wolf is sleek and fast, built for showing off rather than fighting — I've watched her enough mornings to know that.

I step into the circle barefoot. Human. Hands loose at my sides.

Someone laughs, low, quickly swallowed.

Three years ago Roan told me, in the dark behind the old grain shed, *your body knows more than your wolf ever will, if you make it learn.* I didn't understand him then. I understand him now, standing in the cold morning air while Colette's ears flatten and her muscles bunch to spring.

She lunges.

I don't step back. I step *into* it — Roan's first lesson, the one that took me four months to stop flinching from — and I catch the angle of her shoulder as she commits to the leap, redirecting the weight instead of meeting it. She sails past where I was. I drop low under the arc of her body, my palm finding the soft join beneath her jaw before her paws even touch dirt again, and I press.

She twists. I follow. My knee finds the back of her foreleg and her balance goes, and then my forearm is locked across her throat and her muzzle is in the dirt and she is not moving, because moving means my grip closes tighter, and some animal part of her already understands that better than her pride does.

The circle is dead silent. I can hear my own pulse. I can hear Colette's breath rasping through her nose, once, twice.

I hold her there a beat longer than I need to. Not for cruelty. For clarity.

Then I let go.

I stand, brush the dirt from my knees, and turn to the dais, and I bow to Killian exactly the way I bow every morning — head down, spine correct, nothing in my face — as though I did not just put his favorite thing on the ground in front of three hundred witnesses.

His eyes have narrowed. It's small. Almost nothing. But I see it — the first hairline crack in seven years of certainty about who he married.

Good, I think. Let it start there.

---

That evening I take the supply truck out under cover of a grocery run and drive two hours north to Silver Ridge, where Alpha Lyra meets me in her study without her Beta present, the way we've always done our real business.

"You look tired," she says.

"I'm fine." I set the folded accord papers on her desk. "I'm withdrawing my signature."

Lyra doesn't reach for the papers right away. "That accord kept three border skirmishes from becoming wars, Athena."

"It did. Because I brokered it. In my own name — not Blackthorn's, not Killian's." I keep my voice level, the way I've trained it to stay level for years now. "The alliance was always mine to give. It's mine to take back."

She studies me for a long moment, and something in her face tells me she already knows more than she's saying. "When it comes time," she says finally, "send word before the others do."

I take the signed page and don't ask what she means. I don't need to.

---

By the time I'm back, Colette has moved her things into my study.

I find out from the smell before I see it — jasmine and Killian's musk braided together now, worn on her skin like she mixed it herself, deliberate, a claim staked in scent since she has no bond to stake it with. Furs appear in her room. Then a jeweled collar I recognize from my mother's old case. Then, three mornings later, I watch Killian sign the forfeiture deed for the Moonveil magnolia grove, his hand unsteady, his face flushed with a fever he's already telling people is stress.

He doesn't ask me. He doesn't look at me.

I stand in the doorway of his study and watch the ink dry on the one piece of ground that still holds my mother's roots, and I say nothing at all.

The corridor is dark when I hear him.

Not his footsteps — those come later, uneven, too heavy on the left. First it's his breathing, ragged in a way it never used to be, and the smell of Colette's room still clinging to him like smoke that hasn't cleared.

I don't have time to reach my door.

His hand closes around my wrist and the wall is at my back before I've decided whether to fight it. The mate bond does that — pulls him toward me even now, even reeking of her, some old current he can't shut off no matter how hard he tries to drown it.

"Killian—"

"Quiet."

His nose drops to my throat. I feel the heat of him, the fever radiating off his skin like a held breath, and for one terrible second I think the salve has worn thin, that three years of playing dead woman walking are about to unravel in a hallway at midnight because I didn't reapply it after my bath.

Then his whole body recoils.

His lip curls back off his teeth. He makes a sound low in his throat, disgust dressed up as a snarl, and shoves off the wall like I've burned him.

"What is that." Not a question. An accusation.

"I don't know what you mean." My voice comes out flat, unbothered, exactly the register I've spent seven years perfecting.

"You smell—" He doesn't finish it. He doesn't need to. Wolfsbane salve worked into the skin under the jaw smells like rot to a werewolf nose, bitter and wrong, nothing like the floral thread that used to draw him to me before he decided my scent was something to be replaced. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand like he can scrub the smell off his own tongue.

"Get out of my sight," he mutters, and turns for the stairs.

I count his footsteps going up. Fourteen. Uneven the whole way.

---

The stable is unlocked because I unlocked it three hours earlier, and the mare knows my hand well enough not to startle when I lead her out under a moon thin as a fingernail paring.

The ride to the Silvercrest border takes three hours through territory that isn't quite Blackthorn's and isn't quite anyone's — the kind of ground rogues use because no one patrols it hard enough to matter. I keep to the tree line. I keep the vial wrapped in cloth against my chest, and I don't let myself think about what happens if I'm caught with it.

Marcus Doran is waiting at the waypoint exactly where the message said he'd be, leaning against a boundary stone with the patience of a man who has waited in worse places for worse reasons.

"Luna Gardner." He says the pack name like he's testing whether I'll correct him.

I don't.

I hand him the vial first. He holds it up to the moonlight, and even in that thin light the threads of black running through the blood are visible, unmistakable, the kind of rot no healer could call anything but what it is.

"Silverblight," he says.

"Advanced. Untreated as of nine days ago." I hand him the ledger next, leather-bound, the ink gone soft with age in places. "Wolfsbane trade routes. Ashfall rogues, three years of shipments, and the pack that bought them."

He doesn't open it there. He tucks it inside his coat with the same care he gave the vial. "What do you want for this?"

"An audience with King Cassian Vale. On my own terms." I hold his gaze so there's no mistaking it. "Not as a victim asking for rescue. As a source. And when the tribunal comes, as a party with a claim."

Marcus studies me a long moment, the kind of look that catalogs more than a face. "I'll carry the petition," he says finally.

It's enough. It has to be.

---

By the time I'm back, Killian's fever has a name everyone pretends not to say. His wolf's fur dulls at the flanks when he shifts now, patchy along the ribs, so he shifts less and drinks more and holds Colette tighter, mistaking his own unraveling for wanting her more than anything he's ever wanted.

She mistakes it too.

"I want the rite moved up," she announces at dinner, loud enough for the whole table, chin high the way she does everything. "And I want the Luna's quarters. All of it. Before the rite, not after."

Killian doesn't look up from his glass. He doesn't stop her.

I set my fork down beside my plate, precise, unhurried. "As you wish."

The table goes quiet, waiting for more. There isn't more. I fold my napkin, rise, and walk to the cellar that night with two bags of clothes and a candle, and I lay my things down on the cot beside the wall where the tally marks are already climbing, and I do not let myself cry, because crying is for women who still expect something different to happen.