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.

Maverick found me on the east terrace of the Nighthollow estate two days before the banquet.

I was reviewing the seating chart he'd sent over—or pretending to. Mostly I was watching Barnaby nose around the garden beds and trying to remember the last time I'd slept more than four hours straight.

He didn't announce himself. He just appeared at the edge of the terrace with two mugs of coffee, set one on the stone railing beside me, and leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. That was Maverick's way. No entrance, no performance. Just suddenly there, like he'd always been.

'Banquet prep,' he said, nodding at the papers in my hand.

'Banquet prep,' I agreed.

We stood in silence for a moment. The morning was cool and grey, the kind that smelled like rain coming. I wrapped both hands around the mug and let the warmth settle into my palms.

Then he said, quietly and without preamble: 'Do you need anything?'

Not I'm sorry. Not I heard what happened. Not the particular careful gentleness people had been using around me all week, the kind that made me feel like a cracked thing they were afraid to jostle. Just: do you need anything.

I looked at him. He was watching me steadily, the way he always did—like he had all the time in the world and no agenda for how I was supposed to answer.

'I'm fine,' I said.

'I know,' he said. 'I'm asking anyway.'

Something small and inconvenient shifted in my chest. I looked back down at the seating chart.

'I have everything I need,' I said. 'Thank you for the coffee.'

He didn't push. He just nodded and picked up his own mug, and we stood there together for another few minutes while the wind moved through the garden below. And I noticed—not for the first time, but for the first time I was paying attention—that the persistent tight ache behind my sternum, the one that had been there since the banquet, was slightly less present. Like a sound that had been playing too long and suddenly dropped a register.

I filed the observation away and told myself it was the coffee.

Then Barnaby came bounding up the terrace steps and ruined any chance I had of staying composed about anything.

He'd been sniffing around the garden for ten minutes, doing his usual thorough investigation of every interesting smell within a quarter mile. But the moment he spotted Maverick, he stopped dead. His whole body went electric—ears forward, tail going absolutely frantic—and then he launched himself across the terrace like a missile aimed at a very specific target.

Maverick crouched down without hesitation. Barnaby hit him at full speed, rolled immediately onto his back, and lay there with all four paws in the air, whimpering with pure, unguarded trust.

Maverick laughed—a quiet, genuine sound I didn't hear from him often—and scratched Barnaby's chest with both hands. 'Hello to you too.'

I stood very still.

Barnaby was not an indiscriminate dog. He was polite to strangers, cautious with people he didn't know, and he had never, in three years, shown Brody anything warmer than tolerance. Brody said it was allergies. He kept his distance, kept his hands in his pockets, and once told me I should consider re-homing the dog if I ever wanted guests to feel comfortable.

I had apologized for Barnaby. I had actually apologized.

Now I watched my dog lie belly-up on the terrace stones in a state of complete surrender, making soft desperate sounds while Maverick scratched behind his ears, and I thought: when was the last time Brody touched Barnaby at all? Not avoided. Touched. With any kind of gentleness.

I couldn't think of a single instance.

Barnaby rolled back upright and pressed his whole head against Maverick's knee, and Maverick let him, one hand resting easy on the dog's back, still talking to me about catering logistics like nothing extraordinary had just happened.

I turned back to the seating chart. My throat was tight for reasons I didn't examine.

Maverick stayed another twenty minutes, walking me through the banquet layout—which entrance I'd use, where Elara would be positioned, sightlines from the private wing. He was thorough and unhurried and gave nothing away in his face. When he left, he took both mugs back to the kitchen without being asked.

I stayed on the terrace with Barnaby leaning against my leg and the seating chart in my hands.

There was something Maverick wasn't telling me. I'd known him long enough to recognize the particular quality of his silences—the ones that meant he was carrying information and waiting for the right moment. His questions today had been precise in the way that only people who already have answers ask questions.

I didn't press him. Whatever it was, he'd tell me when he was ready. Maverick had never once given me something I wasn't ready to hold.

I scratched Barnaby behind the ear and looked out at the grey morning.

Two days. I just needed two more days.