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.

I told Elara everything on the morning of the banquet.

We sat on the floor of my cottage with Barnaby between us and the footage open on my laptop, and I watched her face go through about six different emotions in under two minutes. Shock first. Then fury—the quiet, flat kind that was more dangerous than screaming. Then something that settled into a look I recognized: the specific expression of a woman who has made up her mind.

She didn't ask me if I was sure. She didn't ask me if I was okay. She just looked at the screen, looked at me, and said, 'Tell me exactly where you need me.'

I told her.

Private wing corridor, north end, before the guests arrived. She'd need access to the inter-pack mind-link broadcast channel—I'd already arranged that through a Nighthollow pack member who owed Maverick a considerable favor and asked no questions. The moment the situation in the private wing became unmistakable, she'd activate the transmission.

'Unmistakable,' she repeated.

'You'll know,' I said.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she reached over, squeezed my hand once, and stood up. 'I'll be in position an hour early.'

That was Elara. No drama, no ceremony. Just: tell me what to do and consider it done.

I sat with Barnaby after she left and rolled the moonstone between my fingers and thought about all the ways tonight could go wrong. I thought about them carefully, one by one, and for each one I found the answer I'd already prepared. Then I put the moonstone in my pocket, got dressed, and drove to Nighthollow.

---

The banquet hall was already full when I arrived.

Nighthollow's estate could hold three hundred wolves comfortably, and tonight it was close to that—wolves from two allied territories moving through the main hall in formal dress, the air thick with competing scents and the low roar of a crowd that had been drinking for an hour. Chandeliers threw warm gold light across the room. The whole thing looked like something out of a painting.

I spotted Adrianna within four minutes.

She was working the room the way she always did at these events—unhurried, graceful, letting people come to her rather than chasing attention. She was wearing my moonstone collar. The crescent bracelet was on her wrist. Her scent drifted across the hall in waves, that familiar cedar blossom and white sage that was mine, that had always been mine, sitting on her skin like a crown she'd stolen off my head while I slept.

But I noticed something. It was subtle—the kind of thing you'd only catch if you knew exactly what you were looking for. The scent wasn't as sharp as it had been at the Harvest Moon Banquet. The edges were softer. Thinner. The last fresh application was wearing down, and there was nothing left to replace it.

Her parents had been gone for two weeks.

I took a glass of water from a passing tray and watched her receive compliments she hadn't earned, and I felt nothing in particular. Just that cold, steady clarity I'd been living inside since the night I watched the footage.

Brody found me twenty minutes later.

I heard him before I saw him—that particular quality of deliberate footfall, the pace of someone who has rehearsed their entrance. He materialized at my shoulder with a champagne flute in each hand and a smile that had cost him nothing to produce.

'Bella.' He said my name like it was a small concession. 'I was hoping I'd find you.'

'Brody.' I kept my voice even. Tired, even. The voice of a woman who had been crying for two weeks and had finally run dry.

'I wanted to say—' He paused, performing a search for the right words. 'No hard feelings. I know this hasn't been easy. I thought maybe a toast.' He extended one of the flutes toward me. 'To moving forward.'

I looked at the glass.

I knew exactly what was in it. I'd watched them plan it in my own bedroom, in my own robe, on my own bed. Wolfsbane, concentrated, enough to knock my wolf flat for an hour. Enough to make me compliant and confused and easy to photograph.

I took the flute from his hand.

He watched me with that smooth, calibrated warmth, and I held his gaze with the expression I'd practiced—wounded, accepting, a woman too tired to fight anymore. I let my shoulders drop just slightly. I let my eyes go a little glassy.

He believed it completely. I could see it in the way his posture eased.

Then I shifted my weight, turning just slightly as if to look across the room, and in the same unhurried motion, I set his glass down on the tray of a passing server and replaced it with the one in my own hand.

The swap took less than two seconds. It looked like nothing.

I turned back and raised the remaining flute. 'To moving forward,' I said.

We drank.

I watched his throat move as he swallowed, and I felt something that wasn't quite satisfaction and wasn't quite grief. It was quieter than both. More final.

He stayed for another minute, saying something I didn't track, and then moved back toward Adrianna. I watched him go.

It didn't take long. Maybe ten minutes. I saw the moment it started—the slight hesitation in his step, the way his head turned as if he'd lost the thread of a conversation. His eyes went a little unfocused. The room was loud and bright and full of competing scents, and his wolf, newly silenced, couldn't sort any of it.

Except one.

Adriana's artificial scent cut through the fog like a blade. Too strong, too singular, the only clear signal left in his scrambled senses. I watched his body orient toward her the way a compass needle swings north—not a choice, just physics. He crossed the room. He said something in her ear. She looked up at him, and I saw the flicker of confusion cross her face before she read it as urgency and let him pull her toward the corridor that led to the private wing.

I set down my glass.

Elara was already in position.