I woke to a dull ache in my lower back and the smell of pine through the open window. Eight months pregnant with twins, and my body felt like it belonged to someone else—heavy, swollen, and constantly reminding me that I was carrying two lives that weren't quite ready to arrive yet.

I pushed myself up slowly, one hand braced against the mattress. Elias's side of the bed was already cold. He'd been leaving earlier and earlier lately, slipping out before dawn without a word through our bond. I used to reach for him in those moments, sending warmth and affection through the mate link. Now I just let him go.

The morning routine was familiar: bathroom, then straight to the medicine cabinet for the stabilizing herbs Maren had prescribed three weeks ago. My pregnancy had complications—something about my wolf's energy conflicting with the pups' development. The herbs kept everything balanced. I wasn't supposed to miss a dose.

I opened the cabinet.

Empty.

I blinked. Stared at the bare shelves. My heart kicked once, hard.

The vials should have been there—six of them, amber glass with handwritten labels in Maren's careful script. The dried bundles of moonvetch and silverleaf, wrapped in cloth and tied with twine. All of it, gone.

I checked the drawer beneath the sink. Nothing. I opened the linen closet, the vanity, even the cabinet under the bathroom counter where we kept extra towels. My hands were shaking now, my wolf stirring uneasily inside me.

"Tasha?"

I turned. Blakely stood in the doorway of the bedroom, wearing one of Elias's old training shirts. It hung loose on her frame, the hem brushing her thighs. Her hair was tousled, her expression soft with concern.

"You okay?" she asked, stepping closer. "You look pale."

"My herbs," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "They're gone. All of them."

Blakely tilted her head, her brow furrowing in that way that always made her look so genuinely worried. "Are you sure? Maybe you moved them somewhere and forgot."

"I didn't move them." My wolf growled low in my chest. "They were right here. In the cabinet. I took the last dose yesterday morning."

"Hmm." Blakely glanced around the bathroom, her gaze sweeping over the counters. "Well, I'm sure they'll turn up. You've been so stressed lately, Tasha. Pregnancy brain is real, you know."

I pressed two fingers against my wrist, grounding myself. "Blakely, I need those herbs. Maren said—"

"I know what Maren said." Her tone was still warm, still concerned, but there was something underneath it now—something I couldn't quite name. "But honestly, don't you think you're being a little dramatic? All those potions and tinctures... sometimes I think healers just like to make pregnant she-wolves anxious."

My jaw tightened. "She's the senior healer. She wouldn't prescribe them if I didn't need them."

"Of course, of course." Blakely reached out and touched my arm lightly, her fingers cool against my skin. "I'm not saying she's wrong. I'm just saying... maybe some fresh air would do you more good than worrying about a few missing bottles. You've been cooped up in this room for days."

I pulled my arm back, not harshly, but firmly. "I need to find them."

"Okay." She smiled, that soft, understanding smile that everyone in the pack seemed to love. "Why don't you ask Elias? Maybe he moved them for safekeeping. You know how he is—always trying to take care of things."

I wanted to laugh at that. Elias hadn't asked me how I was feeling in over a week. He barely looked at me during meals. The mate bond that should have been flooding me with his presence felt like a muted hum in the back of my mind, something I had to strain to hear.

"I'll ask him," I said quietly.

Blakely's smile widened. "Good. And in the meantime, why don't you come with us this afternoon? A few of the she-wolves are doing a light training run. Nothing intense—just stretching our legs, getting some sun. It'll be good for you and the pups."

My wolf stilled. A training run. Eight months pregnant. Without my stabilizing herbs.

"I don't think that's a good idea," I said.

"It's not a real run, Tasha. Just a walk, basically. We'll keep it slow." She leaned against the doorframe, casual and easy. "You've been so isolated. The pack is starting to worry. They miss their Luna."

That word—Luna—felt hollow in her mouth. I was the Luna in title only. Elias had made that clear in a hundred small ways over the past year. And Blakely... Blakely had been given access to everything. The private quarters. The Alpha's schedule. His attention.

I looked at her standing there in his shirt, and something cold settled in my chest.

"I'll think about it," I said.

She nodded, pushed off the doorframe, and started to leave. Then she paused, glancing back over her shoulder.

"You know," she said softly, "sometimes I think you worry too much. Everything's going to be fine, Tasha. You'll see."

She left.

I stood there in the bathroom, staring at the empty cabinet, my wolf pacing restlessly inside me. My hands moved to my belly, feeling the weight of the twins shifting beneath my palms.

Everything's going to be fine.

I didn't believe her.

I wore white to the memorial because that was the tradition—white for grief, white for the ones who came before and the ones who left too soon. Maren had helped me dress that morning, her hands gentle on the buttons at my back, careful not to touch the places where my body still hadn't forgiven me for surviving.

"You don't have to go," she'd said. "No one would think less of you."

"I have to go," I told her. "They were mine."

The great hall of the pack house had been stripped of its usual warmth—no fire in the hearth, no music, just rows of pack members standing in hushed clusters, their voices lowered to the register reserved for death. I took my place near the front, beside the small table where the healer had laid two white candles, unlit, waiting.

That was when Blakely walked in.

Red. Not maroon, not burgundy—a bright, deliberate red, the exact shade Ironveil tradition reserved for mating ceremonies. I'd worn a dress that color myself once, the day Elias marked me. I knew what it meant. Every wolf in that hall knew what it meant.

She found my eyes the second she crossed the threshold, and she did not look away. Not when she passed the elders. Not when she took her place beside Elias at the front, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. Not once.

My wolf lifted her head inside me, a low growl building in her chest, and for a moment I thought I might be sick right there in front of everyone. I pressed two fingers to my wrist and breathed through it. *Not here. Not yet.*

The elders began the old words for the departed, the ones about the Moon Goddess gathering young souls before their time. I heard maybe half of it. My eyes kept drifting to the candles, unlit, waiting for hands that would never come to light them.

When Elder Rourke asked, gently, where the pups should be laid to rest—whether in the pack's burial grove or somewhere more private, as some families preferred—I watched Blakely lean toward Elias and murmur something too quiet for the room to catch.

Elias's face didn't change. That was the thing I would remember longest. It didn't change at all.

"The Omegas can handle it," he said, waving one hand like he was dismissing a scheduling conflict. "Wherever's convenient."

The silence that followed had a texture to it. I felt the elders shift, felt Damon's jaw tighten where he stood near the wall, felt the collective held breath of a room full of wolves who knew, on some animal level, that something had just been said that could never be unsaid.

And inside me, my wolf—who had been keening without pause since the healer's ward, a grief so loud I'd had to muffle it just to function—went silent.

Not broken. Not surrendered. Silent the way the forest goes silent before a storm breaks it open.

I didn't cry. I didn't say anything. I just stood there in my white dress and watched the man I'd married wave away the only resting place our children would ever have, while the woman in red watched me do it.

*Something has to be done about this,* I thought, and the thought arrived without heat, without tears—just clean and cold, like water under ice.

---

Three days later, I asked Maren for a private consultation. She met me in the small treatment room off the healer's ward, the one with the good light and the herbs drying on strings above the window—the same herbs that had gone missing from my cabinet, I noticed, still hanging there in careless abundance.

"How are you healing?" she asked, checking my pulse with two fingers.

"Physically, fine." I watched her face while I said the next part. "I wanted to ask about the conception. The pregnancy itself. How it started."

Maren's fingers stilled against my wrist for half a second too long.

"What do you mean?" Her voice was careful, professionally smooth.

"I mean I want to understand the timeline. When exactly I conceived. What the process looked like from your end." I kept my tone light, curious, the tone of a grieving mother wanting to hold on to any detail she could. "You were involved from the beginning, weren't you?"

"Natasha." She set down her instruments. Her eyes wouldn't quite meet mine. "I signed a confidentiality agreement with the Alpha. Regarding certain... medical matters. I can't discuss specifics."

"I'm not asking you to break it," I said gently. "I'm just asking if there's anything unusual I should know. For my own healing. As your patient."

Maren's throat moved as she swallowed. She glanced at the door, then back at me, and I watched twenty years of pack loyalty war with something else in her face—something that looked, unmistakably, like guilt.

"There are things," she said finally, so quietly I almost lost it beneath the sound of the herbs rustling in the draft from the window, "that were arranged before you ever knew you were pregnant. Things I was told never to discuss with you. I'm sorry, Natasha. I can't say more than that."

She didn't need to. The map was already forming in my mind, every line of it pointing in the same direction—inward, toward Elias, toward whatever he'd built behind my back long before Blakely ever emptied my cabinet.

"Thank you, Maren," I said. "That's all I needed to know."

Evelyn left for the regional pack council meeting on a Tuesday morning, her car pulling out of the long driveway just after dawn. I watched from the window of my temporary quarters—the small guest room on the second floor that Maren had insisted I take after the healer's ward, because going back to the Alpha's suite felt like walking into a tomb.

I waited two hours. Long enough for her to be well past the territory line, long enough that even if she forgot something and turned back, I'd have warning.

Then I went to her rooms.

The pack house had been Evelyn's domain long before Elias became Alpha, and she'd kept her private quarters even after he took the title—three interconnected rooms on the ground floor, tucked behind the library where most wolves wouldn't think to wander. The door was locked, but I'd lifted the spare key from the housekeeper's ring weeks ago, back when I still thought I might need leverage for something smaller than this.

The lock turned smoothly. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

Her sitting room smelled like lavender and old paper. Bookshelves lined two walls, filled with pack histories and genealogies, the spines so worn I could barely read the titles. A writing desk sat beneath the window, its surface meticulously organized—pens in a holder, correspondence stacked in a tray, a leather-bound planner open to this week's schedule.

I didn't waste time on the desk. Evelyn was too careful to leave anything damning in plain sight. I went straight for the locked drawer at the bottom.

It took me three tries with the letter opener before the lock popped. Inside: file folders, labeled in Evelyn's precise handwriting. *Montgomery Bloodline Records. Medical Consultations. Mating Arrangements.*

I pulled out the one labeled *Mating Arrangements* and opened it on the floor.

The first page was a list. Handwritten, dated four years ago—six months before Elias and I were introduced at the Silverpine summer gathering.

*Potential mates for E.M.:*

*Natasha Palmer – Silverpine founding line, excellent health markers, wolf genetics rated superior by Lycan assessment. No known complications. Strong fertility indicators.*

*Kira Ashford – Redstone Pack, secondary bloodline, adequate health but wolf slightly weaker than optimal.*

*Elara Vance – Moonshadow, strong wolf but family history of late-term pregnancy loss.*

There were notes beside each name. Clinical. Detached. Like she was evaluating livestock.

Beside my name, she'd written: *Optimal choice. Proceed with introduction.*

My hands were shaking. I set the page down carefully and kept reading.

The next document was a letter, printed on Lycan medical letterhead, addressed to Evelyn Montgomery. The date was five years ago.

*Dear Mrs. Montgomery,*

*Further to our consultation regarding your son's condition: genetic testing confirms progressive sterility consistent with recessive Montgomery bloodline defect. Azoospermia is now complete. Natural conception is no longer viable. Healer-assisted intervention remains possible if a compatible mate is secured quickly. Confidentiality assured per your request.*

*Dr. Soren Hale, Lycan Fertility Specialist*

I read it twice. Then I read it again.

*Azoospermia.* Complete. No longer viable.

Elias couldn't have children. Not naturally. Not ever.

And Evelyn had known.

I pulled out the next folder—*Medical Consultations*—and found the rest of it. Appointment records. A signed contract with Dr. Hale for a "discreet conception procedure." My name on the patient line. Elias's signature on the authorization line. My signature nowhere.

The procedure had been scheduled three days after our mating ceremony. I remembered that week—Elias had insisted I see "his family's healer" for a routine check, said it was tradition. I'd gone because I trusted him. I'd let them examine me, draw blood, perform an ultrasound I didn't understand the need for.

They'd used my body without asking. Without telling me. They'd treated me like an incubator they were loading with cargo.

My wolf snarled, low and vicious, and I pressed both hands flat against the floor to keep from shifting right there in Evelyn's sitting room.

*Breathe. Not yet.*

I took photos of everything. Every page, every note, every damning line of Evelyn's meticulous record-keeping. Then I put the folders back exactly as I'd found them, locked the drawer, and left the way I'd come.

---

Two days later, I made the call.

Dr. Soren Hale's office was in the Eastern territories, far enough from Ironveil that Elias probably thought it was safe. I used a human burner phone Sawyer had sent me and placed the call from a coffee shop three towns over, where no pack wolves would catch my scent.

The receptionist tried to stall me. "Dr. Hale doesn't discuss patient matters over the phone."

"Tell him," I said calmly, "that this is Natasha Montgomery, formerly Palmer. Tell him I'm invoking Lycan patient-rights provisions as the woman whose body was used in a conception procedure without informed consent. Tell him I have legal representation and I will file a formal complaint with the Lycan Medical Council if he doesn't speak to me in the next sixty seconds."

There was a long pause. Then hold music.

Dr. Hale picked up forty seconds later.

"Mrs. Montgomery." His voice was smooth, practiced. "I'm not sure what you've been told, but—"

"I've been told nothing," I said. "That's the problem. You performed a medical procedure on me without my knowledge or consent. You signed documents authorizing intervention in my body on behalf of an Alpha who concealed a sterility diagnosis from his mate. I want a full report. Certified. Every detail of Elias Montgomery's condition and every step of the procedure you performed. You have seventy-two hours."

"I'm bound by confidentiality—"

"You're bound by Lycan medical ethics," I interrupted, "which require informed consent for any fertility intervention. You didn't get mine. You got his. That's a violation, Dr. Hale, and we both know it."

Silence.

Then, quietly: "I'll have the report couriered to you by Friday."

"Good," I said, and ended the call.

---

The report arrived in a sealed envelope, delivered by a neutral courier to the address Sawyer had provided—a P.O. box in the human town, untraceable to me. I picked it up alone and read it in my car, parked at the edge of an empty lot where no wolves would pass.

*Patient: Elias Montgomery, Alpha, Ironveil Pack.*

*Diagnosis: Complete azoospermia secondary to recessive genetic defect. Irreversible. No viable sperm production. Natural conception impossible. Healer-assisted intervention performed with mate Natasha Palmer on [date]. Genetic material sourced via prior cryopreservation before condition progressed to complete sterility.*

I stopped reading. My vision blurred at the edges.

He'd known. He'd banked his genetic material years ago, before it was too late, and then he'd used it on me without telling me. Without asking.

The pups I'd carried—*my* pups, the ones I'd lost—had been conceived in a procedure I never agreed to, using a method I was never told about, to solve a problem I didn't know existed.

I sat there in the car for a long time, the report in my lap, my wolf howling silently inside me.

Then I called Sawyer.

"I have it," I said when she picked up.

"The sterility report?"

"Everything. The diagnosis. The procedure. Evelyn's records. All of it."

Sawyer didn't waste time on sympathy. "Good. Now we need to talk strategy. You've got grounds for formal Alpha removal under Lycan jurisdiction—non-consensual medical intervention, fraudulent mate bond maintenance, endangerment of a marked Luna. But timing matters. If you move too soon, he'll have time to build a defense. If you wait too long, he'll suspect something."

"I'm not waiting," I said. "I know exactly when I'm doing this."

"When?"

I thought of the memorial gathering. The red dress. The dismissive wave of Elias's hand.

"Soon," I said. "I'll know the moment when I see it. And when I move, it needs to be something he can't undo. Something that destroys everything at once."

Sawyer was quiet for a beat. Then: "Be precise. Be patient. And make sure when you pull the trigger, there's no way he walks away from it."

"I will," I said.

And I meant it.