The suite door slammed behind us. Shane didn't let go of my wrist. He dragged me across the marble floor, past the velvet chairs and the tall windows that overlooked the pack grounds. My feet stumbled. I tried to pull free, but his grip was iron.

"Shane, please—"

He whirled around and backhanded me across the face. My head snapped to the side. Pain exploded across my cheek. I tasted blood.

"You think you can humiliate me?" His voice was low, shaking with rage. "In front of the entire eastern territory? In front of allied Alphas? You let that Lycan bastard bid on you like you're some kind of prize?"

"I didn't—" I gasped. "I didn't ask him to—"

"You stood there!" Shane roared. "You stood there and looked at him like he was your savior!"

He shoved me backward. I hit the stone fireplace mantle hard, my shoulder slamming into the edge. I crumpled to the floor, gasping.

Shane loomed over me. His eyes were wild, his wolf flashing just beneath the surface. "You're mine, Milana. You've always been mine. Every stitch, every thread, every enchantment you've ever woven—mine."

"You promised me Luna," I whispered. My voice cracked. "You promised."

"And you believed me." He laughed, cold and bitter. "That's the difference between us. I'm smart enough to use what's in front of me. You're just stupid enough to give it away."

I tried to push myself up. My right hand pressed against the cold stone floor.

Shane's boot came down on it.

I screamed.

He ground his heel into my knuckles, twisting, crushing bone and tendon and nerve against the unforgiving stone. White-hot agony shot up my arm. I heard something crack. Then another crack. My vision blurred. I couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Just pain. Endless, searing pain.

Inside my mind, Solene howled. A desperate, anguished sound that tore through my consciousness like claws raking glass.

Then—

Silence.

Not the quiet of sleep. Not the stillness of rest. A void. An absence so complete it felt like a piece of my soul had been ripped away.

"Solene?" I gasped inwardly, reaching for her. "Solene!"

Nothing.

Shane lifted his boot. My hand lay twisted on the floor, fingers bent at wrong angles, already swelling purple-black. I couldn't move it. Couldn't feel anything below the wrist except a distant, throbbing numbness.

"You won't be shifting anytime soon," Shane said flatly. "Nerve damage. Permanent, if you're unlucky. Which you are."

I stared at my hand. At the ruin of it. Shifting required the body's full neural network—every nerve firing in perfect harmony to transform flesh into fur, human into wolf. Without those pathways, Solene couldn't surface. She was trapped. Buried alive inside me.

"Solene," I whispered aloud, my voice breaking. "Please..."

Still nothing.

Shane crouched down, his face inches from mine. "Here's what's going to happen. You're going to finish Cameron's gown for the Grand Luna Trials. You're going to do it quietly, quickly, and perfectly. And if you even think about contacting that Lycan prince, if you try to run, if you so much as whisper to anyone outside this pack..."

He grabbed my chin, forcing me to look at him.

"I will call Silas Drake. And I will tell him to disconnect your mother's life support."

My breath stopped.

"Evelyn's hanging by a thread, Milana. Literally. One word from me, and she's gone. Do you understand?"

Tears burned down my cheeks. I nodded.

"Good." He released me and stood. "Guards!"

The door opened. Two Nightveil enforcers stepped inside.

"Take her to the basement workshop," Shane ordered. "Lock her in. No visitors. No exceptions."

They hauled me to my feet. I cradled my ruined hand against my chest. Each step sent fresh waves of agony through my arm. We descended the main staircase, then a narrow service corridor, then stone steps that spiraled down into the cold, damp underbelly of the pack house.

The workshop was exactly as I'd left it. Bolts of fabric stacked against the walls. Spools of enchanted thread on wooden shelves. A single worktable beneath a flickering overhead bulb. The guards shoved me inside and slammed the iron door. I heard the lock click.

I sank onto the floor, my back against the table leg. My hand throbbed. My cheek throbbed. Everything hurt.

But the worst pain was the silence.

I closed my eyes and reached inward again, searching for Solene. For the warmth of her presence, the fierce protectiveness, the steady heartbeat that had been my constant companion since I was thirteen.

Nothing.

Just emptiness.

"Please," I whispered into the dark. "Please come back."

The workshop stayed silent.

I don't know how long I sat there. Minutes. Hours. Time blurred. Eventually, I forced myself to stand. My legs shook. I stumbled to the worktable and found a clean rag, wrapping it clumsily around my swollen hand with my left. The makeshift bandage soaked through almost immediately, dark red blooming across the fabric.

On the table, Cameron's half-finished gown lay draped over a mannequin. Ivory silk. Intricate beadwork. It needed another week of work—delicate embroidery along the hem, enchanted stitching to make the fabric shimmer under moonlight.

I picked up a needle with my left hand. It felt wrong. Clumsy. My dominant hand hung useless at my side.

I threaded the needle. My fingers trembled. The first stitch went crooked. The second tore the fabric slightly. I bit my lip and tried again.

Hours passed. My fever climbed. Sweat dripped down my temples. My vision swam. I kept stitching.

Because if I stopped, I would have to face the truth.

Solene was gone.

And I was alone.

I didn't hear the lock turn. I only heard the heels.

Sharp. Deliberate. Each click landing like a nail driven into the stone floor above my head. I knew that sound. I had heard it a thousand times outside my workshop door over the years, every time Cameron came to collect another piece of my soul and call it her own.

The iron door scraped open. The smell of French roses hit me first, thick and cloying, trying to cover something sour underneath.

"Oh, Moon Goddess," Cameron said, pressing a manicured hand to her chest. "It smells like a sickroom down here."

I didn't lift my head. My left hand kept moving the needle. In. Out. In. Out. The stitches came out uneven. My fever was climbing and the overhead bulb seemed to swing even though the air was perfectly still.

Cameron's heels crossed the stone floor. She stopped beside the mannequin and ran a finger along the ivory silk, tilting her head like a critic at a gallery.

"The beadwork is slow," she said. "The Trials are in six days, Milana. Six. I need this to be perfect."

"It will be," I said. My voice sounded far away, like it belonged to someone else.

"Hmm." She bent closer, lips curving. "You know, you should really thank Shane. If he weren't so sentimental, you'd be out in the woods with the rogues by now. Instead you get this little hobby of yours to keep your hands busy." Her eyes flicked to my right hand, cradled against my chest, swollen and black beneath the soaked rag. Her smile widened a hair. "Well. One of your hands."

I pressed the needle down harder than I needed to. The point slid into my fingertip. A dark bead of blood welled up and dropped onto the hem. I didn't flinch.

"The gift was never yours," Cameron said softly, almost sweetly. "It belongs to whoever wears it. That's how magic works, didn't you know? And come the Trials, that's going to be me. Officially. Permanently." She straightened. "So be a good girl and finish it. And Milana?" She leaned down until her perfume made my stomach turn. "If you embarrass me on that stage, Shane won't be the one coming down here next time. It'll be me. And I don't believe in merciful punishments."

She left. The lock clicked.

I set the needle down. My good hand was shaking. I pressed it flat against the table to make it stop.

The buzz came a few minutes later.

My phone — Shane let me keep it, because he liked having a leash — vibrated on the corner of the worktable. One message. No words. A video.

I stared at it for a long time before I touched the screen.

The camera was shaky, low-angle, filmed from someone's chest. A hospital room I knew by heart. Pale blue walls. The hum of a machine. And my mother, so thin now, her silver-streaked hair spread across the pillow, her chest rising and falling in that slow, drug-measured rhythm I had memorized at thirteen years old.

Silas Drake stepped into the frame. The Nightveil healer. He wore his white coat, his gloved hand resting on the IV line that fed my mother's veins. He didn't speak. He simply looked up at the camera and smiled. A small, patient smile. Then he adjusted the drip, just slightly, just enough that I could see his fingers move on the valve.

The clip was eleven seconds long.

It ended.

I set the phone down very carefully, as though it might detonate. Then I folded forward over the worktable and pressed my forehead against the ivory silk and did not cry, because crying would wet the fabric and I would have to start over.

"Mama," I whispered into the cloth. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

Somewhere far above me, past the stone and the stairs and the locked doors, the pack house went on with its evening. I could almost hear the faint music of the after-banquet reception. Someone was laughing.

I reached inward one more time. Just to check. Just in case.

*Solene?*

The void answered me. Cold and complete.

I picked up the needle.

---

I didn't know, kneeling in that basement, that two hundred miles away, a car was pulling into the gated drive of the Silvercrest estate. I didn't know that the man who had looked at me on that stage like I was the only wolf in the world had not slept since the banquet.

I didn't know that Vincent had walked straight from his jet into a war room, his tie already loosened, his gold eyes burning, and said to the lean, dark-haired Beta standing at attention beside a wall of monitors, "Find her mother. Find every file. Find every camera Shane ever installed. I want it all on my desk by sunrise."

I didn't know Marcus Vance only nodded once, said, "Yes, Your Highness," and already had the extraction teams moving before the door closed.

I didn't know that within hours, Silvercrest intelligence operatives were sifting through shell companies and offshore accounts, peeling back the layers of Shane's embezzlement like rotten bark — pack treasury funds funneled into private hotels, forged alliance contracts, falsified craft attributions stretching back nine years. Every lie, catalogued.

I didn't know that somewhere in a server room, a technician was pulling footage from Shane's own security cameras — the ones he'd installed in my workshop to watch me — and watching himself raise his boot above my hand.

I didn't know that at 3:47 that morning, a plain white medical transport van pulled up to a side entrance of the Nightveil healer wing under the paperwork of a routine supply transfer. I didn't know that Silas Drake was asleep two floors above, and that a Silvercrest medic in a borrowed Nightveil coat was unhooking my mother's monitors with the careful hands of someone who had done this a hundred times.

I didn't know that by dawn, Evelyn Palmer was lying in a sun-warmed room with real windows, and a woman named Clara Hastings was already reading her chart.

I didn't know any of it.

I only knew the needle. The silk. The silence where Solene used to live.

In. Out. In. Out.

Upstairs, I thought I heard a wolf howl. Faint. Distant. Not mine.

I kept stitching.