Isabella's POV

That evening, Owen testified before a hastily gathered council in the great hall. He claimed I had met him in the north storeroom on the fourteenth and held up the shirt planted in my room. I knelt on the stone with my wrists chained, but Noah refused to let me answer. Afterward, they brought me back to Mae's little medical room.

The door banged open an hour before midnight.

Two guards hauled Noah in between them, his arm slung over one man's shoulder. Blood had soaked his sleeve from elbow to wrist, and the smell of it filled the little room, copper and cedar and something burnt underneath.

Silver. I'd know that smell now anywhere.

"Border trap," one guard said to Mae. "The release jammed. It snapped back on him."

Mae was already moving. But Noah shrugged the guards off, dropped onto the cot, and looked straight past her.

"Isabella," he said. "You know how to do this."

And I did. That was the horrible part.

My hands were on the gauze before I'd decided anything. I knew which roll to take, how to fold the pad, where the antiseptic was kept on this shelf. A year of muscle memory picked it all up for me.

*He called us,* Ceci said, bright and awake for the first time all day. *He called us first. If we help him, he'll see. He'll believe us about the shirt, about everything.*

Noah tore his sleeve back. The wound ran down his forearm in a long, ragged line, the edges gray where the silver had touched, little black specks still glittering in the cut. His other hand clamped onto the edge of the cot so hard the frame creaked.

My hand went out toward him.

It got close enough that I could feel the fever heat coming off his skin. Then I stopped it, my fingers hovering an inch from his wrist.

I made myself pull back. I set the blood-stained gauze down on the tray.

"Mae," I said. "Would you take this?"

Noah's head came up. "I asked you."

"I heard." I lifted my left arm so the chain swung between us. "Take this off first."

---

Mae stepped in and started cleaning the wound without waiting for anybody's permission. Noah hissed through his teeth, but his eyes stayed on me.

"You're bargaining," he said. "Now. While I'm bleeding."

"I'm asking. You could say yes."

He didn't. He jerked his chin at the guard by the door, who stepped forward and tossed something onto the empty bed beside the cot.

A white shirt, folded. And on top of it, an envelope with my name on the front in handwriting that wasn't mine.

"Owen found these in your room," Noah said. "Go ahead. Read it."

I didn't need to. I already knew. In the book, the letter was full of *my love* and *meet me where the moon can't see us,* and half the pack had quoted it at Isabella's trial.

"Ruth and I watched Owen carry that shirt upstairs yesterday," I said. "She wrote down the time."

"Ruth will say whatever you need her to say." He flinched as Mae flushed the cut. "I don't care about the shirt. Here's what I'm offering. Admit it. Quietly, to me. And the ceremony at dawn doesn't have to be ugly. No council. No public record. It just happens."

*Isabella,* Ceci whispered. *Can we explain? Maybe if he just listens first...*

"He's not asking to listen," I told her. "He's asking me to sign."

I looked at the chain, then at his hand, still white-knuckled on the cot.

"You want my hands steady enough to help you," I said, "but not free enough to leave."

Something moved behind his eyes. He looked away first.

"Then let's say all of it out loud," I said. "Mae's right here. Tell her what this ceremony does to me, Noah. In front of a witness."

---

Mae tied off the bandage and straightened up. She didn't wait for Noah.

"I'll tell you what it does," she said. She pulled her notepad from her apron, wrote fast, tore the page free, and laid it on the bed next to the forged letter so the two pieces of paper sat side by side.

"A wolf who's been suppressed by silver and sedatives this long doesn't survive extraction the way a healthy one might. She could die on the table. That's not a guess. I've seen it."

Noah's face didn't change.

"Second." Mae pointed at his arm. "That trap broke and threw silver dust into your wound. The extraction device works on the same alloy. If it cracks during the ritual, the dust goes into the air. It weakens every wolf in the room, and in her condition," she nodded at me, "she shouldn't even be standing near it."

"The device is maintained," Noah said.

"So was your trap."

Silence.

Mae turned to me, and her voice gentled a little. "One more thing you should know. A mate bond can be broken from one side. You don't need his consent. But the backlash is real. You'd need rest afterward, days of it, somewhere safe."

I felt Ceci go very still inside me.

Noah stood. He was pale and sweating, but he stood, and he picked up a folded paper from the guard's hand. The ritual order. I recognized the pack seal pressed into the wax.

"Have the device ready by four," he told the guard. Then to Mae: "Your attention belongs with Evelyn tonight. She's the one this ceremony is for. Make sure she's prepared."

Mae stared at him. "You have been told she could die."

"I heard you," Noah said.

He set the order on the bed, on top of the white shirt, and walked out.

I waited for Ceci to cry. I waited for her to beg me to go after him, to say he was tired, that he didn't mean it.

She didn't.

*He didn't even say sorry,* she said. Her voice was flat and small and very clear. *Not once. Why won't he even say sorry?*

I didn't have an answer for her. I just picked up Mae's warning, folded it, and put it in my pocket next to the candy wrapper.

---

Ruth was waiting in the kitchen with the lamps turned low and the ovens banked for the night.

She didn't say hello. She walked to the shelf by the back door, took down the big flour tin, and pried off the lid. Then she pushed her sleeve up and dug her arm in up to the wrist.

When her hand came out, there was a small silver key in it, dusted white.

"Left side of the cabinet," she said. "Second hook. Nobody's counted it since spring."

I took it. It was light, almost nothing, and my hand shook anyway.

"Mae came by an hour ago," Ruth added. "She took the tea vial. Said it'll be in a Redwater lab by tomorrow night."

"Good." I swallowed. "And Roman?"

She pulled a slip of paper from her apron pocket and smoothed it on the counter. It was Mae's handwriting from earlier, *6:15 a.m. East yard*, but beneath it, in a heavier hand, someone had added: *Medical vehicle cleared for departure. My guards will be at the truck. R.*

He'd answered. Exactly like he said he would.

Ruth spread a second paper beside it, a supply map of the house, and traced a penciled line with one floury finger. Out the kitchen door. Down the service corridor past the cold room. Left at the laundry, through the delivery gate, and along the wall to the east yard.

"Guard change is at five," she said. "The night man at the kitchen door leaves at five sharp. The morning man is always late. Four minutes, sometimes six."

"Four minutes," I said.

"Four, if you're counting on luck. Don't count on luck."

I looked at the line until I could see it with my eyes shut. Kitchen door. Cold room. Laundry. Gate. Wall. Yard.

*If we go,* Ceci said quietly, *will it hurt? The bond?*

"Probably," I told her. "But we'll be somewhere we can heal. Somewhere nobody chains us while we do."

A long pause.

*Then I want to walk there,* she said. *With you. Not dragged.*

I slipped the key into my pocket, beside the warning and the wrapper. Then I looked at Ruth.

"Five o'clock. The kitchen door. Both of us."

Ruth nodded once and put the lid back on the flour tin.

Upstairs, somewhere above our heads, I heard the scrape of something heavy being carried across the floor. Toward the ritual room.

It was ready early.

Isabella's POV

The ritual room had been a sewing room once. I could still see the pale squares on the wallpaper where the shelves used to hang.

Now there was a long table draped in white, a changing screen in the corner, and a narrow door at the back that led down three steps into the kitchen. Ruth's kitchen. I could smell the yeast from here.

The device sat at the far end under a sheet, and I didn't look at it.

At four-thirty, an infirmary attendant handed me a cup of something thick and gray. "Ritual draught," she said. "Standard."

I drank it, because two guards were watching and Noah was walking in.

He'd changed his shirt. The bandage on his forearm was fresh, and he carried a single sheet of paper, which he laid in front of me beside a fountain pen. The pen sat next to a pair of silver restraints, as if they belonged to the same set.

"Read it if you want," he said. "It's short."

I read it.

*I, Isabella Vale, confess that I encouraged the attentions of the guard Owen Marsh. I accept the extraction of my wolf freely and of my own will, as restitution to Miss Evelyn Hart for the distress I have caused her.*

Below that was a signature line and today's date, already filled in.

"Sign it," Noah said, "and Evelyn doesn't have to keep defending herself to the whole pack. This ends tonight. Quietly."

"You wrote that I volunteered."

"It's cleaner that way."

I took Mae's folded warning out of my pocket and smoothed it flat on the table, right next to the confession. "Then attach this. If I'm signing something about my own body, the healer's warning goes in the file with it."

He picked it up and read it, and his mouth tightened at *she could die on the table.*

Then he folded it in half and slid it into his breast pocket.

"That's mine," I said.

"It's a medical note about my wife. It belongs with me."

"Then make me a copy."

"No."

He didn't explain, and he didn't have to. If that paper sat in the file, anyone who opened it later would see that he'd been told. He wasn't afraid of the confession being false. He was afraid of his own name sitting next to the risk.

"If this is mercy," I said, "why do you need me to call it my choice?"

---

The room went quiet. One of the guards shifted his weight.

I set the pen down on the table, away from the paper.

"I'm not signing."

Noah looked at the pen for a long moment, then at the guard by the door. "Bring the heavier cuff."

"Noah..." The attendant started to say something and thought better of it.

The guard came back with a band of silver as wide as my palm. He unlocked my old chain and locked the new cuff on before the skin had a chance to cool. The weight dragged my arm down onto the table.

The burn wasn't the worst part.

*Isabella.* Ceci sounded like she was calling from the far end of a long hallway. *Isabella, it's so... I'm so far...*

"I'm here," I said under my breath. "Stay with me."

Noah heard. His face did something I'd never seen it do in the book, a tiny flicker of disgust, like I'd confirmed something.

"That's the problem," he said. "That wolf has spoiled you since you were a child. She agrees with everything you feel. Once she's gone, you'll finally be able to think like an adult."

I stood up. The cuff scraped across the wood.

"She held me together the night my mother died. She ran with me every full moon. She stayed when you moved me into the servants' wing, and she still made excuses for you." My voice cracked, and I let it. "She is the only one who has stayed with me. You don't get to call her the problem."

A small sound came from the doorway.

Evelyn stood there in a white robe, one hand pressed to the crescent necklace, eyes huge and wet. "I'm sorry. I heard shouting, and I just..."

Noah turned away from me without a word and crossed the room to her.

"Hey. It's okay." He put his hands on her shoulders and lowered his voice. "Nobody's angry with you. Go sit down. It's almost over."

He walked her out with his hand on her back.

I watched his shoulders disappear through the door, and I waited to feel the old pull, the need for him to turn around and see me.

It didn't come. I sat back down and didn't ask him for anything else.

---

Procedure said the subject changed into white before extraction, attended by a woman of the household. Noah had signed off on Ruth that morning without reading the line twice.

She came in with the dress folded over her arm. The guards stepped out to wait beyond the changing alcove, and the attendant went with them.

Ruth hung the dress over the screen and didn't hand it to me.

"Stay right here," she whispered, and reached into my pocket.

She drew out the little silver key I had been carrying since the kitchen and pressed it into my good hand, still dusted white.

My fingers were shaking so hard I nearly dropped it. I tried to fit it to the new cuff anyway, and the tip skidded off the lock twice. The draught had turned my hands to rubber.

"Later," Ruth breathed. "Keep hold of it."

Somewhere in the house, a bell rang five times.

Ruth didn't hesitate. She pulled the dress back so it hung neatly behind the screen, the way it would if I were standing behind it, and opened a narrow side door I'd taken for a cupboard. The inventory door. It was how she brought the linens in to count.

The corridor beyond was dark and cold. We went through it, then out past the laundry where the steam smelled like soap, and then the delivery gate was open and the night air hit my face.

Across the east yard, under a single floodlight, a white medical truck sat with its back doors open. Light spilled out of it onto the gravel.

Forty yards. Maybe fifty.

My legs folded.

I caught myself against the stone wall, the cuff clanking on the rock. The world tilted sideways. The draught and the silver were working together now, pulling me down from both ends.

"Ceci," I said. "Ceci?"

Nothing. Just a faint warmth under my ribs, like an ember someone had forgotten to put out.

Ruth grabbed my elbow. Behind us, back toward the kitchen, I heard boots on stone. The morning guard, early for once in his life.

"The door is open," Ruth said. "We have to move."

---

I could have ordered her. *Get up. Be strong. Run.* It was what everyone had always told this body to do.

I closed my eyes instead and turned inward, toward the ember.

"Ceci. I need to ask you something, and I want the real answer." I swallowed. "Do you still want to see him? Is there anything you need to say to him before we go? Because if there is, I won't drag you away from it."

Silence.

The boots came closer. Ruth's grip on my arm tightened until it hurt.

Still silence. It stretched so long that the cold crept up from the stones into my knees, and I started to understand that maybe the cuff had already taken her. Maybe I'd waited one minute too long, and the warmth under my ribs was just my own body, alone.

Then she spoke.

Her voice was thin, barely there, but every word was whole.

*I think I loved the little boy who gave me candy.*

A pause, and I felt her gather herself.

*But I don't know this man anymore.*

The wrapper was folded in my shirt pocket, pressed flat against my chest where my heart was pounding. The key sat cold in my fist.

For the first time since I'd opened my eyes on that stone floor, there was no tug in two directions. She wasn't pulling back toward the house, and I wasn't dragging her away from it.

We both wanted the open door.

I closed my hand around the key and pushed off the wall.

Behind us, the kitchen door banged open.