Nana's cottage smelled like dried lavender and woodsmoke, and for the first two days I didn't get up.

I told myself it was exhaustion. The drive, the cold, the weeks of holding myself together with nothing but locked knees and silence. But my body knew the truth before I did. It finished what the bond's severance had started, quietly and without mercy, in the narrow spare bed under Nana's oldest quilt. I lay still and let it happen because there was nothing else I could do.

Nana knew something was wrong within the first hour. She didn't push — not at first. She brought broth and didn't ask why I wasn't eating it. She changed the quilt when I ruined it and didn't say a word. But I could hear her in the kitchen, the particular way her footsteps went hard against the floor when she was furious and trying not to show it.

On the second morning she stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and looked at me the way she used to when I was twelve and lying about where I'd been.

"Tell me," she said.

"He chose someone else." My voice came out flat. It didn't even hurt to say it. That was the worst part — how flat everything had gone.

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she turned back toward the kitchen and I heard her say his name, low and vicious, in a tone I'd never heard from her before. The sound of a pot hitting the stove. Silence.

I stared at the ceiling and tried to find my wolf.

She wasn't there. Not sleeping, not pacing, not even a distant warmth at the back of my skull. Just absence. A room with the furniture removed, walls still standing. I'd never been alone inside my own body like this — not since I was thirteen and she first surfaced, clumsy and enormous and mine. Now there was nothing, and the nothing had a shape, and the shape was the exact size of everything I'd lost in that clearing.

I didn't cry. I'd done the crying alone in a clinic bathroom while Petra Voss stood outside the door and said nothing because there was nothing to say. I'd used up whatever that was. What was left was quieter and harder and I didn't have a name for it yet.

By the end of the first week I was out of bed. I helped Nana with the garden, carried the heavier things she couldn't manage, watched her hands tremble when she thought I wasn't looking. The oxygen tank had appeared since my last visit, tucked beside her reading chair like it belonged there. She didn't mention it. I didn't ask.

I was watching those hands when Ronan's car pulled up the gravel drive fourteen days after the ceremony.

I heard the engine before I saw it. Something in my chest — the hollow where my wolf used to live — went very still. Not recognition. Just bracing.

He looked the same. That was the first thing I noticed, and it made me tired in a way I couldn't explain. He looked exactly the same, standing in Nana's kitchen doorway with his jaw set and his eyes moving over me like he was checking inventory. Like I was still something that belonged on his list.

"You need to come back," he said. Not hello. Not I'm sorry. Just that.

Nana's chair scraped in the next room. The oxygen tank hissed softly.

"No." The word came out without effort.

His eyes moved toward the sound. Something shifted in his expression — not softness, exactly. Calculation wearing the face of concern.

"Her condition is worse than she's telling you." He kept his voice low, reasonable, like he was doing me a favor. "The pack Healer network has three specialists who could be here within the week. Resources the cottage can't provide." He paused. "All I need is a public pretense. Just through the political season. Six weeks, maybe eight. You come back, you stand beside me at the necessary events, and Nana gets the care she needs."

I looked at him for a long moment. The man who had carved a small wooden wolf with frozen fingers in a hunter's cabin because he had nothing else to give me. The man who had stood between me and his father's enforcers and taken the hit. I looked at him and tried to find the version of him I'd spent years protecting, and found only this: a man who had learned, very early, that my love had no floor.

From the next room came the sound of Nana shifting in her chair, a small labored breath.

My jaw didn't move when I said yes. It came out of somewhere below speech, below decision, from the same place that had driven myself to the clinic alone and folded a report into a recipe book and kept driving north. The place that had been calculating since before I knew there was anything to calculate.

"Six weeks," I said.

He nodded, already satisfied, already turning toward the door like the conversation was finished.

I watched him go and thought: he has no idea what he just handed me.

The guest room smelled like nothing.

Not clean nothing — empty nothing. The kind of nothing that happens when a room has been stripped of every scent that ever mattered in it. Someone had washed the sheets in unscented detergent, replaced the candles, maybe even repainted. There was no trace of me in here. There had never been a trace of me in here. I'd spent three years sleeping two doors down the hall, and this room had always been just a room.

I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and listened to the pack house settle around me.

I'd told myself I could do this. Six weeks. Stand beside him at the necessary events, let the pack see what they needed to see, and meanwhile the specialists would come north to Nana. That was the trade. That was all it was. A transaction I'd agreed to with my eyes open.

But it was past midnight and I couldn't sleep, and the Healer's reference book I'd left in Ronan's study months ago kept surfacing in my mind — Petra's handwriting in the margins, a chapter on bloodline complications I'd been reading before everything ended. I needed it. Not urgently. But I needed something to do with my hands that wasn't lying here calculating the exact number of days until I could leave again.

I got up.

The hallway was dark. The pack house had gone quiet hours ago — the kind of deep quiet that meant the night sentries had cycled through and everyone else had found their beds. My feet knew the route without thinking. Past the second staircase, past the portrait of Ronan's grandfather that had always watched me with the same flat expression Adele used in meetings, past the door that used to be mine and was now, presumably, Aura's.

I stopped in front of the study.

Light showed under the door. A thin line of it, warm and amber. I didn't think anything of it. Ronan worked late. He'd always worked late.

I opened the door.

The orchid scent hit me before my eyes adjusted — thick, fresh, smeared across the room like it had been applied with deliberate hands. Not the faint trace of someone who'd passed through. The full, deliberate weight of someone who had stayed.

Ronan was standing near the desk. His collar was open. His hand rested on Aura's waist with the easy, thoughtless familiarity of long habit — the same way it used to rest on mine, once, in rooms like this one.

They both looked up.

Ronan's expression shifted. Not to guilt. Not to shame. To something flatter and more honest than either of those things — the mild irritation of a man interrupted while doing something he'd never considered hiding, because it had never once occurred to him that he should.

Aura's lips curved. Just slightly. Just enough.

I stood in the doorway and looked at Ronan for three seconds. I counted them. One. Two. Three. Long enough to make sure he understood I wasn't flinching, wasn't running, wasn't giving him the reaction he'd probably already filed away as predictable. Long enough to look at his hand on her waist and feel — nothing. Not the nothing of numbness. The nothing of a door that had already been closed for so long the hinges had rusted.

I pulled the door shut behind me. Quietly.

I walked back down the hall. Past the portrait. Past the staircase. Into the guest room that smelled like nothing.

I sat on the edge of the bed and reached for my grandmother's recipe book.

The Healer's report was still there, folded between sourdough and chicken broth, exactly where I'd left it. I didn't open it. I just held the book in my lap and breathed, slow and even, and let myself think.

He'd signed the papers. He'd tracked me to Nana's cottage. He'd leveraged a dying woman's care to buy himself a political prop for six weeks — and then, on the same night I walked back through his door, he hadn't even moved his hand.

I thought about the wooden wolf he'd carved in the hunter's cabin, the one I'd left on the bed in a straight, silent line with everything else. I thought about what it had meant to me then, and what it meant to me now, and the distance between those two things was the whole shape of the last three years.

My wolf was still silent. No growl, no warmth, no pressure at the back of my skull. Just the absence, the room with the furniture removed.

But underneath the absence — something else. The same thing that had turned over once at the pack house, restless, the night I laid out all his gifts on the bed like evidence. It didn't roar. It didn't surface. It just sat in the dark behind my ribs and waited, patient as something that has all the time in the world.

I opened the recipe book to a blank page near the back.

I found a pen in the nightstand drawer.

I started writing down everything I knew.