My Mate Accused Me of Poisoning His Heir

I wake up to the pain before I wake up to anything else.

It starts behind my left eye — a white-hot spike that drives straight through to the back of my skull. I've learned not to gasp. Gasping brings Martha running, and Martha's face when she's worried is the one thing I can't afford to look at this early in the morning. So I press my lips together, count to eight, and wait for the worst of it to pass.

It always passes. For now.

'Miss Lily.' Martha's voice comes from the doorway before I've even opened my eyes. She has a sense for it — thirty years of reading a pack that never bothered to read her back. 'I've got the water warm.'

'Thank you, Martha.'

The transfer from the bed to the wheelchair is something we've reduced to a kind of choreography. She doesn't make it smaller than it is, and she doesn't make it bigger. She just helps, efficiently and without comment, and I love her for it in a way I've never said out loud.

The herbal paste is already laid out on the vanity. Dark green, thick as clay, smelling of crushed rosemary and something sharper underneath — a compound I developed myself, over months of quiet experimentation in the pack's medical wing. It masks the other smell. The one that's been creeping into my skin for the past few weeks like something left too long in the cold.

I know what it is. I'm a healer. I've sat with enough dying wolves to recognize the scent of a body beginning to lose its argument with itself.

I apply the paste to my wrists, the hollow of my throat, the inside of my elbows. Pulse points. Anywhere the blood runs close to the surface and carries the truth with it.

In the window, the sky is still gray. And there he is.

Jaxson runs the border every morning before the pack wakes. I used to run it with him — back when I had legs that worked and a wolf who loved the cold air and a version of myself that believed the bond between us was something he felt too. Now I watch from the second-floor window of the guest quarters I've been relocated to, and I count his strides the way I used to count my own, and I don't let myself feel it.

I'm very good at not letting myself feel things.

He disappears into the tree line. I turn away from the window.

---

The Alpha Ball is the Blood Moon Pack's annual performance of itself — all candlelight and formal wear and the careful theater of hierarchy made visible. I arrive early enough to choose my position: a spot near the east wall, beside the ramp, where the shadows are deep enough that I can see without being the thing people look at.

I'm wearing the deep blue gown Martha pressed this morning. My hair is up. I look, I think, like a Luna. I have learned to look like a Luna even when every other signal in this Pack House tells me I am not one.

The music stops when Jaxson enters.

It always does. That's the protocol — the Alpha's entrance commands silence. What is not protocol is the woman on his arm.

Gia Turner moves through the doorway like she was built for it. The dress she's wearing is ivory, draped in a style I recognize from old pack photographs — the kind of silhouette that belonged to another era, another woman. A dead woman. The resemblance is not accidental. Nothing about Gia Turner is accidental.

Jaxson leads her to the center of the floor. The orchestra resumes. They begin to waltz.

The Alpha Waltz is supposed to be danced with the Luna. Every wolf in this room knows that. The whispers start before the second measure — I can hear them even from the shadows, even over the music, because werewolf hearing is one of the things the silver didn't take from me.

'The crippled Luna...'

'Can't even stand, let alone dance...'

'He deserves better...'

I grip the armrests of my wheelchair. I keep my face still. I watch Jaxson spin Gia across the floor, his hand at her waist, his expression open in a way I haven't seen directed at me in longer than I can remember. My chest does something complicated and painful that I refuse to name.

I stay until the waltz ends. Then I go to find him.

---

His office smells like cedar and Gia's perfume and the particular cold that Jaxson carries when he's feeling powerful.

'You broke protocol,' I say from the doorway. 'The Alpha Waltz—'

'Is a tradition.' He doesn't turn around. 'Not a law.'

'It's a signal to every other pack that attended tonight. You just told them your Luna is—'

'What she is.' He turns then, and his eyes are flat and certain in the way that means he's already decided how this conversation ends. 'A Luna in name only. A burden the elders saddled me with because of a bond I never asked for.' He moves to his desk, straightening papers that don't need straightening. 'Gia is moving into the Pack House. Permanently. I'd suggest you make your peace with that.'

Something shifts in me. Something that has been bending for a very long time.

My eyes land on the moonstone carving on the corner of his desk. Small, pale, shaped like a crescent — he'd found it at the border woods when we were nine years old and given it to me, and I had given it back to him the day the bond confirmed what I'd always known, and he had kept it here, and I had told myself that meant something.

I pick it up.

I throw it against the wall.

The crack is very loud in the quiet office. The stone hits the floor in pieces — four, five, more. Jaxson goes completely still in the way that usually means danger, but I am already turning my chair toward the door, and I find that I don't care.

'Liliana—'

I don't stop. I don't look back. I wheel myself out into the corridor and I pull the door shut behind me, and the sound of the latch catching is the quietest, most final thing I've heard in years.

My hands are shaking on the wheels.

I press my thumb against the inside of my wrist and count to eight.

Down the hall, in the Luna's suite that is no longer mine, I can already hear Gia's laughter.