I broke the glass ampoule against the edge of the iron slot and tilted Sarah’s head back.

"Swallow," I urged, letting the bitter drops hit her tongue. "Come on, Sarah. Breathe."

Her chest hitched. The blue tint around her mouth slowly faded to gray, but the silver dust on the cellar floor was still eating through her skin. I took off my heavy wool coat, ripped the lining with my teeth, and bunched it under her head like a pillow. The cold stone bit into my bare arms, but I didn't move. I hovered over her, using my own body heat to keep her shivering frame from freezing solid.

Heavy boots pounded down the stone steps outside.

"Alpha, please," Beta Marcus's voice echoed through the corridor, breathless and shaking. "You don't understand. It’s not just Emilia down there. Your mother—the Queen is in the vault!"

The heavy bolts screeched back.

The door flew open, slamming against the stone wall. Alpha Leonardo stood in the frame. His dark hair was windblown, his designer coat immaculate, but the arrogant scowl on his face turned paper-white the moment his eyes hit the floor.

Sarah lay limp on my torn coat, blisters bubbling red along her forearms where the silver had seared her.

"Mother?" Leonardo choked out.

He didn't look at me. Not once. He didn't see my blistering hands or the blood on my knees. His mind was already spinning, frantically calculating the disaster. Sarah wasn't supposed to be here. Sarah was supposed to be in the capital, hundreds of miles away.

"Get the stretchers!" Leonardo roared to the guards behind him, his voice cracking with panic. "Carry Her Grace to the healing ward! Move!"

Two male wolves rushed in and lifted Sarah gently onto a canvas cot. Leonardo stepped aside to let them pass.

I stood up slowly, my joints aching, and waited for him to meet my gaze. I waited for one shred of guilt. One spark of the mate bond that had tied our souls together for five years.

Instead, Leonardo pulled his lapels straight, turned his back on me, and walked up the stairs.

"Assemble the pack," he muttered to Marcus. "Now."

***

I followed him up into the warmth of the pack house, leaving a trail of gray silver dust on the polished hardwood.

The Great Hall was packed shoulder to shoulder. Five hundred wolves stood in dead silence beneath the high timber rafters. On the raised dais near the hearth stood Cheyenne. She was clinging to Leonardo's arm, her cheeks glistening with fresh, delicate tears, playing the part of a terrified mother defending her home.

Emmett was nowhere to be seen. They had hidden my son away.

I stopped at the center of the hall, twenty feet from the dais. My dress was torn. My skin was red and blistered from the silver. I was trembling from the bone-deep chill of the cellar, but my spine was steel.

I reached out with my mind, tapping into the frayed, fragile wire of our mate bond.

*Look at me, Leo,* I projected into his skull. My voice was level, dead calm. *Explain this to me.*

Leonardo flinched as my voice touched his thoughts. He looked down at me from the dais, his dark eyes hard, cold, and entirely devoid of remorse. He saw the threat I posed. He saw his three years of lies, his stolen Luna, and his poisoned secrets unraveling before his pack.

Cheyenne squeezed his arm, letting out a soft, theatrical whimper.

That was all it took.

Leonardo cleared his throat. He puffed out his chest, letting his Alpha aura wash over the room, demanding absolute silence.

"Ironveil," Leonardo projected, his voice booming off the cedar beams. "A pack cannot thrive with a ghost for a Luna. A woman who abandons her mate and her pup has no place at my side."

He locked his eyes onto mine.

"I, Leonardo Ashford, Alpha of the Ironveil Pack, reject you, Emilia Ashford, as my mate and Luna."

The words struck like an iron mallet straight to my sternum.

A sharp, deafening crack echoed through my skull, like thick ice splintering over a winter lake. At the crook of my neck, the mate mark went blindingly cold. The warmth that had lived there since my nineteenth year evaporated in a single second, leaving behind a dead, frozen numbness.

Deep inside my consciousness, my inner wolf let out one agonizing howl—and then went dead silent. Dormant. The mental space where her breathing used to echo went completely dark.

My knees gave out. I hit the floor hard, my palms slamming against the timber.

Across the room, five hundred wolves gasped as the psychic shockwave of a severed bond rippled through the pack link. It was sickening. Visceral.

Cheyenne let out a quiet sigh of relief, sliding her slender fingers into Leonardo’s hand.

I knelt on the floor, staring at the wood grain, suffocating in the sudden, hollow silence of my own soul. Emmett’s terrified face. The poison in his breath. The silver cellar. Three years of blood and diplomatic sweat, thrown into the dirt for a liar and a thief.

The grief crushed down on me. But beneath the grief, something else stirred.

A tiny spark in my blood, buried so deep I had never known it was there, caught fire.

My breath hitched. My pulse didn't race—it thudded like a war drum, vibrating straight through the floorboards.

A sickening snap echoed through the silent hall.

It was the sound of my collarbone breaking.

Then my ribs cracked, expanding outward.

I didn't scream. The agony was blinding, but the rage was bigger. An impossible, ancient heat flooded my veins, burning away the silver poison, burning away the chill of the cellar, burning away the phantom ache of Leonardo's dead mark.

"What is she doing?" someone whispered.

"Her wolf is dormant—"

A roar tore from my throat. It wasn't the voice of a standard she-wolf. It was a deafening, thunderous sound that rattled the iron chandeliers overhead.

My body surged upward, bone shifting into muscle, flesh wrapping into thick, luminous silver-white fur. I didn't just shift; I exploded outward. In three seconds, a massive beast stood in the center of the hall, standing nearly eight feet at the shoulder—towering, radiant, and terrifyingly vast.

Then the aura hit.

It didn't roll out like Leonardo's aggressive, posturing pressure. It descended like the sky falling. An absolute, suffocating wave of pure royal command flattened the room.

The two Betas flanking the dais didn't even have time to brace themselves. Their knees buckled, slamming into the hardwood with a sickening thud, their heads bowed to the floor by pure biological reflex.

Leonardo staggered backward, his face drained of all color, his boots tripping over the hearthstone as his own wolf cowered inside his chest. Cheyenne shrieked, scrambling behind his legs, trembling so hard she couldn't stand.

In the open archway of the corridor, the two healers carrying Sarah’s stretcher froze in their tracks.

The Lycan Queen propped herself up on one bruised elbow, ignoring the pain in her chest. Her amber eyes locked onto my silver-white fur, feeling the unmistakable, ancient frequency vibrating in the air.

Sarah’s breath caught in her throat.

"Crown blood," she whispered.