The envelope is heavy cream paper with the Lycan Court seal pressed in silver wax.

I break it at my kitchen table while Buster snores against my feet. Inside is a card with my name printed in black ink. *Ivy Larson. Retained Healer, Ironveil Lycan Court.* Full Summit credentials. Every door, every session, every banquet.

Seven years ago, I couldn't get a pack to let me sleep in their barn.

Under the card is a second sheet. It's an intelligence brief, flagged red by Ellis, Logan's Gamma. I read it slowly.

*Ashvale delegation requests private audience with Healer Larson. Urgent. Alpha Cole Thomas transported to pre-Summit medical briefing by stretcher. Shift duration under four seconds. Aura unstable.*

A stretcher.

I wait for something to happen inside me. A flinch. A pang. Anything.

Nothing comes. My wolf lifts her head, sniffs at the name like it's old meat, and lies back down.

I set the paper aside. Then I hear a thump from the laundry room. Buster is gone from my feet. He trots past the doorway with one of Logan's black socks hanging from his mouth, tail swinging like he just won a war.

I laugh and send the picture straight through the mind-link. The guilty eyes. The sock. The tail.

Logan answers in two seconds. I feel his laugh warm in my chest before the words arrive.

*That's my last clean pair. Tell him he's fired.* A pause. Then softer. *I saw the brief. Your call. Always your call.*

I pick the request up again. I take a pen and write one word under Ashvale's neat signature.

*Declined.*

I seal it and hand it to the courier myself.

---

They don't take no for an answer. They never did.

Two days before the Summit opens, Ellis knocks on my office door.

"Madalyn Thomas is at the east perimeter," he says. "No appointment. She says she'll wait."

Cole's aunt. The one who used to smile at me at pack dinners and forget my name by dessert.

"Then let her wait," I say.

Ellis nods once. He doesn't ask how long. He knows me.

I finish my morning work. I calibrate three elixirs for a Lycan child with fever-bind. I eat lunch. I answer letters. Logan checks in through the link around noon.

*Your back okay?*

*It's fine.*

*Liar.* A moment later, a mug of ginger tea appears on my desk, carried in by a junior aide who blushes and leaves fast.

Four hours after Madalyn arrives, I button my Court jacket. Dark gray, with the Ironveil silver at the collar. I leave the collar open. The scar on my neck shows. I don't hide it anymore.

Then I walk to the antechamber.

---

She stands when I enter. That's new.

Madalyn looks older. Gray at her temples now, lines around her mouth. But her pearls are the same, and so is her smile, polished and practiced.

Then my scent reaches her.

I see it land. Wildflowers, and woven all through it, cedar and winter storm. Logan's scent isn't sprayed on top of mine. It's part of mine. Every wolf can read it. *Claimed. Protected. Untouchable.*

Her nostrils flare. Her smile slips one millimeter. Then she fixes it.

"Ivy," she says warmly, like we're old friends. "Thank you for seeing me."

I sit. I don't answer.

She sits too, and she begins.

She's good. I'll give her that. She talks about the bond first. How the Moon Goddess doesn't make mistakes. How something that deep can't just vanish. Then Cole. How he can't sleep. How he wakes up screaming for a wolf that won't answer. How his hands shake when he tries to shift, and his fur comes out in patches before it folds back into skin.

"He says your name," she tells me softly. "In his sleep."

I don't blink.

She moves on. Ashvale. The pack that raised me. The healer who trained me. The children I used to treat.

"You took an oath," she says, and now there's steel under the silk. "A healer heals. Refusing a dying wolf because of an old grudge? That isn't justice, Ivy. That's cruelty. Is that who you want to be?"

She slides a folded paper across the table. "Full diplomatic recognition of your new status. From Ashvale. In exchange for one private consultation."

Recognition. Like I need their permission to exist.

She folds her hands and waits.

I let the silence sit. One second. Two. Her thumb starts rubbing her knuckle. Three. Four. She opens her mouth.

Five.

"The bond you invoked doesn't exist," I say. My voice is flat and quiet. "He made sure of that."

I put two fingers on the paper and push it back to her. I never unfold it.

Then I stand and straighten my jacket.

"Ivy—" Her voice cracks on my name. "Ivy, wait. You don't understand how bad it is."

I do. I wrote it down seven years ago. Forty pages.

I walk out.

At the end of the hall, I glance back through the glass door. Madalyn hasn't moved. She's staring at the paper in front of her like it's a dead thing. Her pearls look too heavy for her neck.

She came here to bargain. She just learned she has nothing I want.

Warmth brushes the back of my mind. Logan.

*How'd it go?*

I breathe out. My hands are steady. My heart is steady.

*She knows now,* I tell him.

*And Ashvale?*

I think of a stretcher. A wolf that won't answer. A Summit full of Alphas who will be watching.

*They'll find out in two days.*

The Summit opens at nine in the morning, under a sky so blue it almost hurts.

I watch from the second-floor gallery of the Pack House. Below me, the arrival courtyard fills with wolves. Black SUVs roll through the iron gates one after another. Alphas step out in dark suits, their Lunas beside them, their Betas a half-step behind. Thirty-one packs. I count the banners as they go up.

Ashvale comes last.

I know it before I see the green and gold. The courtyard goes quiet in a ripple, starting at the gate and moving inward. Conversations stop mid-word. Heads turn.

Four Ashvale wolves walk through the gate carrying a stretcher.

Cole lies on it under a gray blanket. His hair is cut short now. His face is thin, the cheekbones sharp enough to cast shadows. Seven years ago he could walk into a room and make every wolf in it lower their eyes. Now I have to reach for his aura to find it at all. It's a flicker. A match in the wind.

The whispers start.

*Is that Thomas?*

*Under four seconds, I heard. He can't even hold the shift.*

*Silvercrest's boy. The one with the serum.*

Luke walks at the right side of the stretcher. Chin high. Jaw tight. He stares straight ahead like he can't hear a thing, but his ears are red to the tips. Behind him, Margaret moves in a cream coat and pearls, her steps slow and even. Her face is calm. Her hands are not. She keeps twisting the strap of her purse.

I wait to feel something. Pity. Satisfaction. Anything.

My wolf yawns.

A warm weight settles in the back of my mind.

*You okay up there?* Logan asks.

*I'm fine.*

*Ellis put them in the east hall of the private wing. Long walk from your office.* A pause. *Unless you want it shorter.*

I almost smile. *I'm not hiding from a stretcher, Logan.*

*Didn't think you were.*

---

At eleven, I'm carrying a case of fever-bind samples back from the infirmary. The private wing is quiet. Soft carpet, tall windows, the smell of polished wood.

I hear the shuffle of feet before I turn the corner. Then a sharp, ragged gasp.

I step around the corner and stop.

The Ashvale wolves are halfway down the corridor. And the stretcher is shaking.

Cole's back arches off it. His fingers claw at the blanket. His eyes are wide open, and they flash gold, bright and wild, the way they used to when his wolf was strong. A sound tears out of his throat. Not a word. Half a howl, broken in the middle.

The man at the front corner stumbles. The stretcher tips. Luke grabs the rail and shoves it level.

"Cole!" Margaret's voice cracks. "Cole, what is it?"

But I know what it is.

It's me. My scent. Wildflower and moonstone, the scent his wolf was made to find. And twisted all through it, so deep it can't be pulled apart, cedar and winter storm.

His wolf smelled me. For one second, it woke up and remembered.

And then it understood.

The gold in his eyes fades. His body drops flat. His chest heaves. Slowly, his head turns on the thin pillow, and he finds me.

"Ivy." It comes out like gravel.

The corridor freezes. Luke's mouth opens. Margaret goes white.

I set my case down against the wall. I walk toward them. My heels are quiet on the carpet. Nobody stops me. Luke shifts his weight like he wants to, then doesn't.

Up close, Cole looks worse. There's a gray tint under his skin. The veins at his wrists are dark. And under his sweat, faint but there, I smell bleach.

The same smell from seven years ago. It never left him.

I look at him the way I look at every patient. Pupils. Breathing. The tremor in his left hand. The patch of half-shed fur at his neck that never folded back. Forty pages, all of it, right in front of me.

Then I kneel beside the stretcher. Not close. Just low enough to meet his eyes.

He makes a small sound. Hope. I watch it rise in his face.

"Your wolf isn't sick," I say quietly. "It's being eaten. The serum fakes strength by burning the wolf spirit for fuel. Slowly at first. Then all at once."

His lips part.

"The last vial had a counter-agent in it. It would have stopped the damage. For good. It would have made your wolf immune to anything Victoria ever gave you."

I let that sit. One breath.

"The formula was in the vial you smashed."

His eyes go wide. His throat works.

"I can't make it again," I say. "It had to be calibrated to your wolf through the bond. That bond is gone." I tilt my head, so he can see the pale scar on my neck. "You remember."

His mouth moves. *Ivy. Ivy.* No sound comes out at all.

Behind me, Margaret makes a choked noise. Luke stares at the floor.

I stand up and brush off my knees.

In the back of my mind, warm and sudden, an image blooms. Buster, asleep on our bed, belly up, all four paws in the air.

I breathe out.

Then I pick up my case and walk away. I don't look back.

Behind me, Cole finally finds his voice. It's just one sound. Thin and broken.

Like glass on stone.