The bus terminal at 2 a.m. smelled like wet concrete and burnt coffee.

I sat on a steel bench with my arms wrapped around myself. I had borrowed a stranger's cardigan from the lost-and-found bin. It was too thin, but it was something. The cardboard box sat between my feet. Two sweaters. A toothbrush. My mother's brush.

I had forty dollars in my shoe. No phone. No plan that fit in a pocket.

Then I smelled cologne. Too much of it.

"There she is," Marcus Thorne said.

He walked up with another Starlight ranking wolf, a thin man named Pike who always stood half a step behind. Marcus sat down beside me like we were old friends. He crossed one ankle over his knee.

"You were hard to find, Mop."

I said nothing.

"Here's the deal." He pulled a folded paper from his jacket and smoothed it on his thigh. "Blanket NDA. You sign it, you say nothing about the ledgers, the charter, or the Vanguard. Not a word. And the five-hundred-thousand suit goes away."

The ledgers. He had said *ledgers*. I had never mentioned them.

My wolf lifted her head. *They're scared.*

"Why would I have anything to say about ledgers?" I asked.

Marcus's smile slipped for half a second. Pike shifted his feet.

"Sign," Marcus said, and the smile came back.

I looked at the pen he held out. Then I looked at him.

"No."

Pike sucked in a breath. Marcus leaned closer. His voice dropped low and friendly, which was worse.

"Then listen carefully. Every shelter. Every pack-adjacent motel. Every safehouse in this region. One call from me and your name is on a list." He tapped my knee with two fingers. "You'll sleep in a ditch, sweetheart. And I can make that call from right here."

"Go ahead," I said.

He did. He didn't even stand up.

He was right. He could do it, and he did it well.

The first shelter, a church basement two miles away, opened its door and then shut it again when the night volunteer looked at my face. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "You're the girl from the video." The second place wouldn't open at all. At the third, a she-wolf behind a glass window sniffed once and recoiled.

"You smell *wrong*," she said.

I stood on the sidewalk with my hand still raised to knock.

She was right about that too.

It had started somewhere between the second door and the third. A sour edge on my own scent, like fruit turning in a bowl. My hands shook so hard I had to tuck them under my arms. Every swallow tasted like metal, like I had bitten a coin. Heat rolled up from the center of my chest and pooled behind my eyes.

My royal aura was not fading. It was *burning*. From the inside out.

I walked until my feet bled into my flats. At a gas station on the highway, a night clerk with tired eyes watched me count out coins for a phone call. When I said a name, an old name from a back channel I had saved for emergencies, he went still.

"Vance," he said. "The rogue healer. Room nine, Pine Ridge Motel. Tell him Dottie's boy sent you."

The motel was a long gray row of doors under a buzzing sign. Room nine opened before I knocked.

Dr. Silas Vance was gaunt, gray at the temples, with the flat eyes of a man who had stopped being shocked years ago. He took one look at me and stepped aside.

"Sit. Don't talk."

He pressed two fingers to my throat, then my wrist. He held a cold lamp near my eyes. When he put his palm flat over my sternum, I gasped. It felt like he had touched an open wound.

"Rejected bond," he murmured. "Fresh. And you've been suppressing a royal aura for years." His eyes cut to mine. "That's not a thing you do for fun, girl. That's a thing you do for love."

"How long?" I asked.

"Hours." He took his hand away. "Not days. The aura is splintering. Past a point, it locks in broken. Permanent. You'd live, but you'd be a shell. Ordinary. Maybe less."

I stared at the water stain on the ceiling.

The charter signed at the summit in two days. Once the Council sealed it, Evan's forged ledgers would become protected treaty documents. Untouchable. Any proof I brought after that would be an attack on the throne's own word.

"If I don't move before it seals," I said slowly, "the lie becomes law."

"Then I'd move," Vance said, and handed me a small vial. "This will take the edge off. It won't fix anything."

I drank it. It tasted like pennies and smoke.

By dawn, the fever had me. I took a rideshare with the last of my cash to a storage facility off Route 9. The unit was small and cold. I had rented it six weeks ago, under a name no one knew, for no reason I could explain. Instinct. A tug in my gut I had told myself was paranoia.

Behind a stack of old winter coats sat a black metal case.

I dragged it out. My fingers fumbled with the latch. Inside was a slim encrypted drive and a battered tablet I had kept hidden from everyone.

The screen lit. A password prompt blinked at me.

I knew the answer. I had always known.

I typed the date of our first pack run.

The drive opened.

I stared at the cursor, blinking, patient, waiting. Four years. I had carried that date like a prayer. Evan, who had stood beside me in that meadow with his hands shaking, had never once remembered it. Not on our anniversary. Not on any day.

I had been alone in this bond for a very long time.

My wolf didn't speak. She only pressed close.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my wrist. Then I opened the secure link and watched the progress bar fill. The mirror I had built quietly, weeks ago, before I ever suspected him, sat waiting on the Vanguard throne's sealed servers.

Every ledger. Every log.

Every single thing he thought he had smashed on that table.