I wore the green dress because Brody once said it made my eyes look like moonlight on still water. That was eight months ago, standing in the kitchen of my small Thornfield cottage, and he'd smiled at me like I was the only thing worth looking at. I'd believed him. God help me, I'd believed every word.

The Harvest Moon Banquet was supposed to be ours. Three years together. I'd even asked Elara to save us seats near the front.

I walked into the hall and the first thing I noticed was the crowd. Everyone was already gathered around the ceremonial stage, which wasn't unusual for a banquet opening. The second thing I noticed was Adrianna Snyder standing on that stage beside Brody, wearing my moonstone collar.

I stopped walking.

The collar was custom-made. A graduated string of raw moonstones set in silver, each stone hand-selected from my family's Silverpeak estate. I knew every single bead. I'd worn it at my fifteenth birthday. I'd packed it away carefully in a cedar box in the estate's east wing three years ago when I came to Thornfield to live simply, to live quietly, to live like a girl who didn't carry a king's bloodline in her veins.

Adranna had it around her throat like she'd been born with it.

And on her wrist—the crescent-moon charm bracelet. The one I'd designed myself. The one I'd pressed into her hands two years ago when she was crying in the training yard, convinced she'd never be more than what she was born into. I'd told her the crescent moon meant you were always becoming. I'd meant it as a gift.

She was using it as a costume.

Brody stepped to the microphone. His voice was warm and steady, the same voice that used to say my name like it meant something.

"I want to share something with this pack tonight," he said. "Something I should have understood sooner." He reached for Adrianna's hand. "Adrianna Snyder carries true Lycan blood. She is the she-wolf the Moon Goddess placed in my path. She is meant to be my Luna."

The hall went quiet in that particular way that means everyone is holding their breath.

Then he looked directly at me.

I had wondered, in some distant theoretical part of my mind, what it would feel like. The formal rejection. I'd heard about it from others—the way the words hit like a physical blow, the way the bond-pain moved through you like something tearing.

I hadn't understood.

"I, Brody Weaver, reject you, Bella, as my chosen mate."

The pain arrived before the words finished. It started in my chest and moved outward, fast and total, like every nerve in my body had been dipped in fire. My wolf screamed—not out loud, but inside my skull, a long raw howl that no one in that hall could hear. My knees wanted to buckle. My hands went cold.

Every wolf in the room was watching me.

I breathed in through my nose. Out through my mouth. I kept my chin level.

I turned and walked out.

Not fast. Not stumbling. I walked the way I'd been trained to walk since I was old enough to understand what I was—with my back straight and my face giving nothing away. I heard the murmur start behind me as the doors swung shut.

Outside, the night was cold and the lanterns along the path blurred a little at the edges. I stopped walking when I reached the oak tree at the far end of the courtyard, the one with roots thick enough to sit on, and I let myself have one breath. Just one. A long, shuddering exhale that I pressed my fist against my sternum to hold in.

The bond-pain came in waves. I let them come.

My wolf was silent now. Not calm—silent. The kind of silence that comes after a howl when the sound is still ringing in the air.

I stood there in the dark and I thought about the moonstone collar. About the crescent bracelet. About the way Adrianna had stood beside him like she'd earned it, wearing my scent—I'd caught it the moment I walked in, my own custom oil blend, cedar blossom and white sage, on another woman's skin.

I thought about how long that must have taken. How many trips to Silverpeak. How many small thefts, carefully spaced.

The grief was still there. I won't pretend it wasn't. Three years of my life. Three years of choosing him, funding him, believing in him.

But underneath the grief, something else was already moving. Quiet and cold and very, very precise.

I pulled out my phone and opened a new document.

Moonstone collar. Crescent bracelet. Scent oil—cedar blossom blend, batch three.

I started a list.

By morning, I was going to know exactly what she'd taken. Every vial, every stone, every item she'd lifted from my family's estate over three years to build herself a crown out of my things.

And then I was going to figure out exactly how to take it all back.

I finished the inventory at four in the morning, sitting cross-legged on my cottage floor with Barnaby's head heavy on my knee. The list had grown longer than I expected. Three vials of scent oil. A pair of moonstone earrings I hadn't worn since I was nineteen. A silver hairpin shaped like a crescent that had belonged to my grandmother.

And the bracelet.

I stopped typing when I got to it. My thumb hovered over the screen, and for a moment I just sat there, staring at the words I'd written. Crescent-moon charm bracelet, gifted to A.S., year two of mentorship.

I remembered the day I gave it to her. She'd been sitting on the split-rail fence behind the training yard, sixteen years old and furious at the world, scrubbing tears off her face with the back of her hand because Gamma Reyes had told her Omega-born wolves didn't make good fighters. I'd sat down next to her and said nothing for a long time. Then I'd taken the bracelet out of my pocket—the one I'd sketched myself, had a silversmith in the next town cast without ever telling her what it cost—and I'd pressed it into her palm.

"The moon isn't always full," I'd told her. "But it's always becoming something. That's not a flaw. That's the whole point of it."

She'd cried harder. I'd thought it was gratitude.

Now I understood it was something closer to calculation. She'd worn that bracelet on stage tonight like a birthright, like proof carved into silver that the Moon Goddess herself had marked her as royal. Every stolen vial of oil, every lifted stone—those were theft. Ugly, but simple. The bracelet was something else. She had taken the one thing I'd made with my own hands, out of my own kindness, and turned it into a weapon aimed straight at my chest.

Barnaby lifted his head and whined low in his throat, sensing something in me shift.

"I'm fine," I told him, which was a lie he didn't believe for a second.

I closed the document. I didn't cry. I'd done enough of that walking home from the banquet, in the dark, where no one could see. What I felt now was colder and steadier, and it had a shape to it, like a plan assembling itself piece by piece whether I willed it or not.

The lake house came to me almost immediately. It sat on the quiet edge of the Silverpeak estate, technically mine, though I hadn't stayed there in over a year. Brody knew it well—we'd spent whole weekends there in the early days, before I'd understood what those weekends were costing me. He knew the code to the boathouse. He knew which window latch stuck. He knew, better than almost anyone outside my family, exactly how private that property was.

If he and Adrianna needed somewhere to disappear together, somewhere far from Thornfield eyes and close enough to Silverpeak's supply of stolen finery, that house was the obvious choice.

I drove out the next afternoon with a box of security equipment ordered overnight and delivered to a P.O. box under a name that wasn't mine. I installed the cameras myself—one in the den, tucked into the crown molding above the bookshelf, one in the hallway mirror frame, one angled through the kitchen transom. My hands were steady the whole time. I told myself it was strategy. I didn't examine too closely why installing cameras in my own bedroom felt like performing surgery on my own heart.

Then I set the feeds to record continuously, and I waited.

It took three days.

I was in my cottage kitchen when the alert came through, notifying me that motion had triggered the den camera. I opened the feed with my tea going cold beside me, and there they were.

Brody and Adrianna, sprawled across my bed, my stolen jewelry scattered across the nightstand like party favors. She was wearing my robe. He had his hand at her throat, right where the moonstone collar usually sat, tracing the place where his mark would go.

I almost closed the laptop. I almost couldn't watch.

Then Brody spoke, and his voice—casual, unbothered, the voice of a man discussing dinner plans—stopped my hand cold.

"We need her compliant. Not conscious enough to fight it, not out enough to miss the moment."

Adrianna laughed, soft and pleased with herself. "Wolfsbane in the champagne. Enough to knock her wolf flat for an hour. That's all we need."

"And the pictures?"

"Insurance," she said. "If she ever opens her mouth about where I came from, we remind her what the whole pack saw her doing on her knees."

I sat very still in my kitchen, tea gone cold, and listened to the two of them plan exactly how they intended to destroy me at the next banquet—already certain, already so sure, that I would never see it coming.

I watched the footage three times.

Not because I needed to. The first time was enough to understand everything. The second time was to make sure I hadn't misheard a single word. The third time, I watched with the sound off, just studying their faces—the way Brody leaned back against my headboard like he owned it, the way Adrianna traced a finger along the edge of my grandmother's silver hairpin while she talked about destroying me.

Then I closed the laptop.

I sat at my kitchen table for a long moment, hands flat on the wood, and I let myself feel it. Not the grief—that was already done, already processed in the dark on the walk home from the banquet. What I felt now was something simpler and much colder. It was the specific sensation of the last warm thing inside me going out, like a candle someone had been cupping their hands around finally guttering in the wind.

His voice. That was what did it.

Not the words—the tone. Smooth, unhurried, the same calibrated warmth he used when he told me I was the only one. The same voice that once said my name like it meant something was now mapping out exactly how many milligrams of wolfsbane it would take to knock my wolf flat for an hour. Clinical. Practical. Like it was a logistics problem and I was the variable he needed to neutralize.

I rolled the small moonstone from my pocket between my fingers—a habit I'd never broken, a private thing I did when I needed to think—and I thought.

They had a plan. That was fine. I had their plan now, which meant their plan was already mine.

The Pack Banquet was being hosted by Maverick Harrison at Nighthollow. Three weeks out. Brody would approach me with a champagne flute. Wolfsbane, concentrated enough to strip my wolf for several hours. Adrianna would have a photographer ready. By the end of the night, they'd have pictures—Bella, disoriented and compliant and on her knees—and those pictures would be their insurance policy forever. Every time I thought about speaking the truth about where Adrianna came from, or what Brody really was before I built him into something, they'd remind me what the whole pack thought they saw.

I put the moonstone down on the table.

It was a good plan, honestly. If I were the girl they thought I was—a heartbroken, discarded she-wolf with no resources and no recourse—it would have worked perfectly.

I was not that girl.

I opened a new document and started writing.

The first thing I wrote was: supply line.

Adriana's scent was the foundation of everything. My custom cedar blossom and white sage oil, batch three, decanted into her skin until she smelled like something she wasn't. That scent was what had convinced Brody. That scent was what had convinced the pack. Take it away and you had an Omega's daughter standing in stolen jewelry, and the jewelry alone wouldn't hold up to scrutiny the way the scent did.

The supply line ran through Silverpeak. Through her parents—her Omega parents, both stationed at the estate as household servants, both in a position to pocket vials and small items and pass them along whenever Adrianna needed a refresh. Quiet. Patient. Years of it.

I needed them gone before the banquet. Not confronted. Not warned. Just gone, cleanly and completely, before they could send her anything else.

I thought about it for a while. Then I picked up my phone and called the estate manager at Silverpeak—a woman named Dorothea who had served my family for twenty years and who would carry any instruction I gave her to her grave without asking why.

'I want to arrange something for the Snyders,' I said when she answered. 'A recognition trip. Honorary. Frame it as a reward for years of loyal service—send them somewhere nice, somewhere far, somewhere they'll feel genuinely honored.' I paused. 'Book it for next week. Make sure it's a long one.'

Dorothea was quiet for exactly two seconds. 'Of course, Miss Crescent. Shall I arrange for their quarters to be cleared while they're away?'

'Yes,' I said. 'And Dorothea—have legal draw up the formal dismissal papers. Effective upon their return. I'll need the debt documentation attached. All of it.'

Another pause. Shorter this time. 'I'll have it ready.'

I hung up and sat back.

The Snyders would leave thinking they'd been honored. They'd come home to find themselves dismissed, burdened with their daughter's accumulated debts, and permanently removed from the one place that had been feeding her fraud for three years. Adrianna wouldn't know until she needed a fresh vial and found the line dead.

By then, it would be too late to restock before the banquet.

Her scent would still be there—you couldn't strip custom oil from skin in three weeks—but it would be fading. Thin at the edges. Not enough for anyone to notice yet, but enough that I would know. Enough that when the time came, I'd have one more thread to pull.

I looked down at my list. Added a line at the bottom.

Banquet: champagne flute. Watch which glass he carries.

I underlined it once.

Three weeks. I had three weeks to make sure that when Brody Weaver handed me a drink meant to take everything from me, I was ready to give it back.