The mornings at Ironridge had a shape now.

I woke before the sun. I made the bed in the small back room because making the bed was something I could finish. I walked to the sanctuary kitchen, ate whatever was on the counter, and reported to whichever enclosure needed hands. By the second week, I had stopped flinching when someone passed behind me.

My hands were always doing something. Bandages, mostly. The rogue-attacked wolves came in chewed up in ways that needed redressing twice a day, and I learned the rhythm fast—unwrap, clean, repack, retie. When I ran out of bandages I sorted herbs. When I ran out of herbs I walked the perimeter fence and mended the chain-link where the rogues had tested it the night before.

I didn't notice my left hand kept drifting to my neck until I caught Rhodes watching me do it.

He didn't say anything. He never did. He'd just be sorting feed or signing a logbook, and his eyes would move once to my hand on my throat, and then back to whatever he was doing. By the third time I caught him at it, I started keeping that hand busy on purpose.

We didn't talk much. He gave me shift assignments in three words. He pointed at supply lists instead of reading them aloud. The first time he said my name out loud, I'd been there four days, and he said it the way he said everything else—plainly, without weight.

One evening I was on the back porch wrapping a torn fence-glove when a cup appeared next to my elbow.

Tea. Steam rising off it in the cold.

I looked up. Rhodes was already walking away, hands in his coat pockets, heading toward the wolf pens like he hadn't done anything at all.

I sat with the cup in both hands for a long time. The heat went through my palms and stayed there. I didn't drink it right away. I just held it, and watched the steam climb, and let the small fact of it settle somewhere under my ribs that I hadn't known was still capable of registering small facts.

When I finally took a sip, it was honey and chamomile. He had remembered which jar I'd been sorting that morning.

***

The rogues came at moonrise.

I was in the back enclosure with Barnaby, sitting on my flat rock, sorting valerian into a tin. The first scream came from the eastern fence—a handler, then a wolf, then the wet sound of teeth finding something soft.

I was on my feet without remembering standing.

Three shapes broke through the fence line at once. Lean, mangy, foaming at the mouth in a way I'd only seen in stories—true feral, the kind that had been gone too long to remember what they used to be. They poured into the clearing in a low, scrabbling run, and I pressed my back flat against the sanctuary wall because my body knew, before my mind did, that I had nowhere to go.

Then the air changed.

It's the only way I can describe it. The pressure in the clearing dropped, the way it does before a storm, and every rogue in the yard froze mid-stride. Their heads went down. Not in attack posture. In submission.

Rhodes stepped out from the porch.

He was already shifting. I'd seen wolves shift before—at Shadowveil, dozens of times, the snap of bone and the rush of fur. This was not that. This was something I had no reference for. He grew. The shape of him filled the space between one breath and the next, dark-furred and enormous and wrong-sized, head higher than the porch rail, shoulders heavier than any Alpha I'd ever stood next to.

The rogues didn't run. They couldn't. Whatever was radiating off him had pinned them where they stood like a hand on the back of the neck.

He didn't hurry. He moved through them with a kind of clinical precision—one, two, three—and it was over before I'd taken a full breath. The bodies dropped where they were standing. The clearing went still.

My back was still against the wall. My pulse was hammering in places pulses don't usually hammer—behind my eyes, in my teeth, in the dead spot on my neck that hadn't felt anything in weeks.

And then—

A crack.

Behind my eyes. Silver. A flash so brief I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it. And underneath the crack, somewhere far below the surface of me, a sound. Not a word. Not yet. Something like a voice trying to speak through water, muffled and ancient and very, very angry.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe. The thing under the water went quiet again, like it had only meant to knock once.

Rhodes's wolf turned toward me across the clearing. His eyes found mine. He held the look for a long second—too long—and then he turned away and began checking the bodies.

I lowered my hand from my neck. It was trembling.

Not from fear. From something else. Something I didn't have a name for yet.

I didn't tell him. I didn't tell anyone. I went back inside and sat on the edge of my narrow bed and pressed both hands flat against my thighs to keep them still.

***

In Shadowveil, that same night, Alexis Ashwood walked into Liam's private quarters wearing my old gray sweater.

She'd soaked it in something. I would learn this later. Some chemist's blend, a careful imitation of wildflowers and rain, layered over her own skin like a mask. She had practiced the way she would tilt her head. She had practiced the way she would say his name.

Liam's wolf hit the false scent and recoiled so hard he stumbled backward into his own desk.

The revulsion came before the thought. He told her to get out in the Alpha tone—the real one, the one that bent knees—and Alexis went down on hers in the corridor before she'd consciously registered the command. The pack-house guards had her out the front door inside a minute. He barred her from the building before she'd finished crying.

He stood in the open doorway afterward, breathing like he'd run a mile.

And then, soft as a hand on his shoulder, the real scent came back.

Wildflowers. Rain.

His wolf made a sound he hadn't heard it make before. Not a growl. Not a whine.

Something closer to grief.

The flicker came back on a Tuesday.

I was holding down a rogue-wolf during treatment—a young male with a gash across his ribs that kept reopening because he wouldn't stop thrashing. Maren was stitching. I had my weight across his shoulders, my hands pressing his front legs flat against the table, and he was making a sound in his throat that I felt more than heard.

"Almost done," Maren murmured. Her hands were steady. Mine were not.

The wolf bucked. My grip slipped. And behind my eyes—

Silver. Bright enough this time that I had to close them. Not a flash. A flare. Like someone had struck a match inside my skull and held it there.

I didn't let go of the wolf. I kept my hands where they were and breathed through my nose until the light faded and Maren said, "Got it."

I stepped back. The wolf went limp with relief. I walked out of the medical shed on legs that felt like someone else's and sat down on the ground behind the building where no one could see me.

My hands were shaking again. The dead spot on my neck was warm.

Not painful. Just... present. Like something dormant had rolled over in its sleep.

I pressed my palm flat against it and waited for the feeling to pass.

It didn't.

***

The nightmares started that week.

Not every night. Just often enough that I stopped being surprised when I woke up on the floor with my back against the wall and my knees pulled to my chest. Always the same dream. The ceremonial ground. Liam's voice carrying across two hundred witnesses. The bond tearing out of me in real time while my father stood in the crowd and did nothing.

I woke from one of those on a Thursday and the silver was there before I'd fully opened my eyes.

Not a flicker this time. A presence.

I sat up slowly. My heart was doing something complicated in my chest. The room was dark except for the moonlight through the window, and I was alone, but I didn't feel alone. There was something else in the space with me. Not outside. Inside.

I put my hand on my neck. The warmth was still there.

"Hello?" I said it out loud. My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.

Nothing.

I let my hand drop. Told myself I was imagining it. Told myself the wolfsbane withdrawal—if that's what this was—was playing tricks on my nervous system. Told myself to go back to sleep.

I didn't sleep.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my feet on the cold floor and waited for dawn.

***

The voice came three nights later.

I was alone in my room. It was past midnight. I'd been sorting through a box of old bandages Rhodes had asked me to inventory, and my hands had gone still on a roll of gauze because the neck-scar was aching again—not sharp, just a dull, persistent throb that made it hard to think about anything else.

I pressed my fingers against it. The warmth flared.

And then—

*"Hello, Summer."*

I froze.

The voice was inside my head. Not outside. Not a sound I heard with my ears. It was deeper than my own internal register, older, and unmistakably not mine.

I sat down on the floor. Right where I was. The gauze roll dropped from my hand and bounced once before going still.

"Who—" I started. My actual voice came out thin. I tried again. "Who are you?"

*"My name is Solene,"* the voice said. Calm. Certain. *"I am your wolf."*

I stopped breathing.

Twenty years. Twenty years of every healer, every pack member, every well-meaning stranger telling me my wolf didn't exist. Twenty years of standing in training yards watching other wolves shift while I stayed exactly the same. Twenty years of Liam's careful patience when he looked at the empty space where my wolf should have been.

Twenty years of believing I was broken.

"I thought you weren't real," I whispered.

*"I was always real,"* Solene said. Her voice—my voice, except it wasn't—carried a weight I didn't have words for. *"They just made sure you couldn't hear me."*

I put my hand over my mouth.

The tears came before I could stop them. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just quiet, relentless, the kind that come from somewhere too deep to control. I pressed my palm against my neck and felt the warmth there pulse once, twice, like a heartbeat that had been waiting twenty years to start.

*"I'm sorry,"* Solene said softly. *"I'm sorry I couldn't reach you sooner."*

I shook my head. I couldn't speak. I just sat there on the floor of my small sanctuary room and cried for the first time since the ceremonial ground—not because I was sad, but because something inside me had finally named itself, and I had spent my entire life believing I had nothing to name.

***

I didn't tell Rhodes.

I meant to. I walked to the main house the next morning with the intention of saying it plainly—*I heard my wolf*—but when I got there, he was on the porch with Maren, and they both looked up at me with expressions I couldn't quite read.

Maren spoke first. "Summer. Can you come inside for a minute?"

Her tone was careful. Clinical. The way people sound when they're about to deliver bad news they've rehearsed.

I followed them into the kitchen. Rhodes pulled out a chair for me without a word. I sat.

Maren set a file on the table between us. Medical records. My name across the top.

"I ran a full panel during your wellness check last week," she said. "Standard procedure for new sanctuary residents. The results came back yesterday."

I looked at the file. Didn't open it. "And?"

Maren glanced at Rhodes. He nodded once.

She opened the file and turned it toward me. Rows of numbers. Chemical compounds I didn't recognize. And at the bottom, circled in red ink: *Wolfsbane accumulation—chronic, long-term exposure.*

"This isn't trace amounts," Maren said quietly. "This is years. Possibly a decade or more. Someone has been dosing you continuously since before your wolf should have awakened."

I stared at the page. The numbers blurred. My hands went very still on the table.

"Who?" I said.

Maren shook her head. "I don't know. But whoever it was, they knew what they were doing. The dosage was calibrated to suppress without killing. That takes knowledge. And access."

I thought of my father's kitchen. Alexis setting my plate in front of me every morning. The way she always smiled when she did it.

My stomach turned.

Rhodes was watching me. His face was unreadable, but his hands were flat on the table, and I'd learned by now that when Rhodes went very still, it meant he was very angry.

"We're going to find out who did this," he said. His voice was quiet. Certain. "And we're going to make sure they can't do it to anyone else."

I looked at him. Then at Maren. Then back at the file.

*They just made sure you couldn't hear me.*

Solene's voice echoed in my head, and suddenly everything made sense. The wolflessness. The years of feeling broken. The way my family had always treated me like something fragile that needed managing.

They hadn't been protecting me.

They'd been burying me.

I stood up. The chair scraped loud against the floor.

"I need some air," I said.

Neither of them stopped me.

I walked out onto the porch and kept walking until I reached the eastern fence line, where the woods started and the sanctuary ended. I put my hands on the chain-link and squeezed until my knuckles went white.

Inside my head, Solene was quiet. Waiting.

*"They poisoned us,"* I said silently.

*"Yes,"* she said.

*"For years."*

*"Yes."*

I closed my eyes. Breathed once. Twice.

*"What do we do now?"* I asked.

Solene's voice, when it came back, was not sad. It was not afraid.

It was furious.

*"Now,"* she said, *"we wake up."*