The fluorescent lights in Dr. Sarah Chen's examination room made everything look sicker than it was. Or maybe that was just me.

I sat on the paper-covered table, the thin sheet crinkling every time I breathed, and I watched Sarah's hands shake as she set down the lab results. She'd been my pack physician for six years. I had never once seen her hands shake.

"Violet." Her voice was careful. Too careful. "The fainting episodes—the muscle weakness you've been experiencing—" She paused. Pressed her lips together. "We ran the full panel twice."

"Just say it."

She looked up at me then, and I already knew. Somewhere deep inside, beneath my ribs where Luna—my wolf—lived, I already knew. Luna had gone quiet weeks ago. Not sleeping. Just... quiet. Like she was conserving what little she had left.

"Lupine Atrophy Syndrome," Sarah said. "Terminal stage. Your wolf is—" Her voice broke on the word. "She's decaying, Violet. The paralysis will begin within months."

The room didn't spin the way I expected it to. It just went very, very still.

LAS. I knew what it was—every wolf did, the way humans knew about certain cancers. Rare. Merciless. No cure.

I pressed my palm flat against my sternum, as if I could feel Luna through the bone. There was nothing. Just a faint, distant ache, like an echo in an empty hall.

*I'm here,* she whispered. So faint I almost missed it. *I'm still here.*

"How long?" I asked.

Sarah couldn't answer that. She tried, but the numbers blurred, and eventually I stopped listening. I just needed to get out of that cold, white room. I needed Nash.

---

The walk to his private office on the second floor of the pack house felt longer than usual. I kept my arms wrapped around myself, the autumn air biting through my sweater. Every step felt deliberate, like I was carrying something fragile that might shatter if I moved too fast.

Nash would know what to do. He always did. He was my Alpha, my mate—three years of Sunday mornings and quiet dinners and his hand at the small of my back at pack gatherings. He would pull me in, press his lips to my forehead, and tell me we would fight this together.

I just needed him to say that.

His office was empty when I pushed the door open. The desk lamp was on, papers spread across the surface, his half-finished coffee still warm. He'd only stepped out.

I exhaled. Let myself breathe for the first time since Sarah's hands started shaking.

Nash's jacket was draped over the back of his chair. Dark navy, the one I'd bought him last winter. I crossed the room and reached for it without thinking—just wanting something familiar, something that smelled like him, like cedar and rain and home.

I pressed it to my face.

And the world ended.

The scent hit me like a fist to the throat. Beneath the cedar and rain, threaded through every fiber—

Floral. Cloying. Sweet in a way that turned my stomach.

Anastasia.

Not just a brush of contact. Not a hug in passing or a shoulder touch in a meeting. This was deep. Woven in. The kind of scent that only transferred through hours of closeness, through skin against skin.

I dropped the jacket.

Nash's phone buzzed against the desk. Once. Twice.

I shouldn't have looked. I knew that, even as I reached for it. The screen was still lit, no lock engaged—he'd forgotten. On it was a thread I didn't recognize at first, a number saved under a name he'd never mentioned to me.

*Ana.*

I scrolled up with numb fingers. The messages loaded slowly, and each one was worse than the last—photos, words I can't repeat even now without my vision going white. And then, at the top of the thread, the most recent message.

An ultrasound image.

Blurry, black and white, unmistakable. And beneath it, her words in that bubbly font she always used for texts:

*Our strong pup is kicking, Daddy.* 🐾

I was still holding the phone when Nash walked in.

He stopped in the doorway. Something flickered across his face—not guilt. Calculation.

"Violet—"

"How long?" My voice didn't sound like mine. It was too quiet. Too steady.

"You don't understand the full situation—"

"*How long, Nash.*"

He crossed his arms. And then he used it—that low, resonant command that vibrated in my bones and made Luna whimper in the dark. His Alpha tone. Directed at me.

"*Enough.*" The word pressed down on my shoulders like a physical weight. "The Luna Ceremony was symbolic. It was never fully completed—you know that." His jaw tightened. "Anastasia is carrying my heir. She saved my life years ago. I have a *duty*—"

"She's pregnant," I said. My hands were shaking now. "Nash, I need to tell you something. I need you to listen to me, I was just at the clinic and Sarah said—"

"Don't." His voice turned cold. Dismissive. "Don't do this right now. Don't make this about you."

The words landed like a slap.

He thought I was lying. He thought I was desperate. He looked at me—three years, a thousand mornings, the Luna Ceremony I had cried through because I thought it meant something—and he looked at me like I was a problem to be managed.

He walked out.

The door clicked shut behind him.

I stood alone in his empty office, holding his phone, with the ultrasound still glowing on the screen and Luna going silent again in my chest.

I was dying.

And I had never been more alone in my life.

The house was cold when I got back.

I hadn't turned the heat on in days. It didn't seem to matter anymore. I stood in the entryway with my keys still in my hand, and I thought about Nash's face when he walked out—that flat, dismissive look, like I was a footnote in a story about someone else's life.

Luna whimpered somewhere deep inside me. A distant, threadbare sound.

The landline rang.

I almost didn't answer it. My legs were already shaking from the walk home, the LAS grinding through my joints like something mechanical and rusted. But something made me cross the room, pick up the receiver, press it to my ear.

"Ms. Mitchell?" The voice on the other end was professional. Careful. "This is Silverfang General. Your father, Gerald Mitchell, was brought in approximately forty minutes ago. Cardiac arrest. He—" A pause. That specific kind of pause. "We need you to come in."

I was already moving before she finished the sentence.

---

I was too late.

The attending physician said it happened fast. He said it was peaceful. He kept talking, and I stood in the hallway outside Room 14 with my hand pressed flat against the wall because my knees wanted to go and I wasn't going to let them. Not here. Not in front of strangers.

My father had died alone.

The nurse, trying to be kind, mentioned that they'd attempted to reach Alpha Nash first—protocol for a pack warrior's next of kin. His phone had gone to voicemail. Later, through the pack grapevine, someone mentioned they'd seen him that afternoon at a baby boutique three towns over. Picking out cribs. Anastasia on his arm, laughing at something, her hand resting on her barely-there bump.

While my father's heart stopped.

I sat in the plastic chair next to his bed for two hours after. I held his hand, which was already cooling, and I told him I was sorry I wasn't there. I told him he would have hated the fluorescent lights in this room. I told him Luna was sick, and Nash was gone, and I didn't know what I was going to do.

I don't think I cried. I think I was past that.

---

The funeral pyre was three days later.

I stood at the front of the gathered pack, my legs braced against the wind, and I watched the flames take the last person who had ever looked at me like I mattered unconditionally. My body ached from standing. LAS didn't care that this was my father's funeral. It ground through my muscles anyway, slow and merciless.

Nash arrived late.

I heard the murmur move through the crowd before I saw him—that subtle shift, packmates stepping aside, making room the way they always did for an Alpha. I didn't turn around. I kept my eyes on the fire.

But I felt when they stopped beside me. Both of them.

Anastasia wore black, but it was the kind of black that still managed to flatter. Her hand was hooked through Nash's arm, and she wore her bump like an announcement, one palm resting beneath it with practiced tenderness. Nash's jaw was set. He didn't look at me.

The pack noticed. Of course they did. I could feel the whispers at my back like small cold fingers.

When the ceremony ended, Anastasia stepped forward and pulled me into a hug before I could move away. Her arms wrapped around me, tight and performative, and she pressed her cheek to mine.

"I'm so sorry for your loss," she said, loud enough for the people nearest us to hear. And then, dropping her voice to barely a breath against my ear: "He knew, you know. What you were becoming. A wolfless disappointment. He was ashamed of you before the end."

She pulled back with wet eyes, dabbing at the corners with her thumb.

The pack saw a grieving woman offering comfort. I stood perfectly still and let the words do what they were designed to do, settling into the cracks in my chest like something corrosive.

---

The week that followed was the quietest I had ever known.

I stopped answering the door. I stopped eating at regular hours. I sat at the kitchen table sometimes for so long that the light outside would change, and I'd realize I'd lost hours without noticing.

And then the images started.

It began as a flicker—like catching movement in your peripheral vision. A feeling of intrusion at the edge of my mind. At first I thought it was Luna's symptoms worsening, some new phase of the decay. But then the images sharpened, and I understood.

Anastasia.

She was using the pack mind-link. Unauthorized, unprovoked, and with precise, surgical cruelty. The images she pushed into my mind were not accidental. They were chosen.

I tried to block her. Luna tried to help. But my wolf's defenses, already fragile, were dissolving like wet paper. I'd throw up a wall and she'd walk through it. I'd curl into myself and she'd find the seams.

I stopped sleeping.

By the sixth night, I sat on the bathroom floor at two in the morning with my hands pressed over my eyes and Luna barely a flicker in my chest, and I thought: I cannot survive another week of this.

The thought didn't scare me.

That was what scared me.

Dr. Sarah Chen's office looked different this time. Maybe it was the late afternoon light slanting through the blinds, turning everything amber and soft. Maybe it was the way Sarah wouldn't meet my eyes when I walked in.

Or maybe it was because I'd come here to schedule my death.

"Are you sure?" Sarah asked. Her hands were folded on the desk between us, knuckles white. "Violet, there are still experimental treatments we could try—"

"How long would they buy me?" My voice came out steadier than I expected. "Weeks? A month?"

She didn't answer. That was answer enough.

I looked down at the form in front of me. Wolfsbane-Assisted Euthanasia Request. The words blurred and sharpened. Luna stirred weakly in my chest, a flutter like a dying bird.

"Next week," I said. "The anniversary of my mother's death. I want it then."

Sarah's breath hitched. "Violet—"

"Please." I picked up the pen. My hand shook so badly the first signature was illegible. I had to do it twice. "I can't do this anymore. The pain, the images she keeps sending—" My throat closed. "I just want it to stop."

Sarah reached across the desk and covered my hand with hers. She didn't try to talk me out of it again. Maybe she understood. Maybe she'd seen enough terminal cases to know when someone had reached the end of what they could carry.

I signed the last page and stood up. My legs nearly gave out, but I caught myself on the edge of the desk.

"One week," Sarah said quietly. "If you change your mind—"

"I won't."

I left before she could see me cry.

---

I woke up to agony.

Not the dull, grinding ache I'd grown used to. This was different—sharp and immediate, like someone had replaced my blood with battery acid. I tried to scream but my throat locked. My back arched off the mattress.

Something was wrong. Something was *wrong*.

Through the haze of pain, I caught movement near the door. A figure in scrubs, a surgical mask covering most of her face. But I knew those eyes. I'd known them since we were children.

"Ana?" The word came out broken.

She pulled the mask down, and her smile was the cruelest thing I'd ever seen.

"You were going to die anyway," she said, holding up an empty syringe. "I just made sure it would hurt more."

She was gone before I could move, before I could think. The door clicked shut and I was alone with the fire spreading through my veins.

I looked down at my arms. Black lines were crawling beneath my skin, branching out from the injection site like roots. The necrosis—it was accelerating. Days of deterioration happening in minutes.

I tried to reach for my phone. My hand wouldn't cooperate. Luna was screaming inside me, a sound I felt rather than heard, and then she went silent.

Completely silent.

I don't remember calling for help. I don't remember much of anything after that except the black veins and the certainty that Anastasia had just stolen even my controlled exit. She'd turned my death into something worse.

---

Three days later, Nash's Beta delivered the order personally.

I was in bed, because standing required crutches now and even that was agony. Marcus Reid stood in my doorway looking uncomfortable, holding a formal pack summons like it might bite him.

"The Alpha requests your presence at the hospital ribbon-cutting ceremony," he said. "Tomorrow at noon."

"Tell him no."

Marcus shifted his weight. "It's not a request, Violet. He said—" He stopped. Started again. "He said it's about pack unity. Appearances. With the neighboring Alphas attending and the press—"

"I can barely walk."

"I know." His voice dropped. "I'm sorry."

He left the summons on my dresser and saw himself out.

I stared at the ceiling and tried to find Luna. There was nothing. Just a vast, empty space where my wolf used to be. The black veins had faded to a sickly gray-green, but the damage was done. Whatever Anastasia had injected me with had accelerated the final stages. My body was shutting down.

But Nash wanted appearances.

I laughed, and it hurt my ribs. Of course he did. The pack needed to see their Luna, even if she was a hollow shell. Even if she could barely stand.

I would go. Not for him. Not for appearances.

I would go because I wanted to look Anastasia in the eye one last time before I died.

---

The ceremony was already underway when I arrived.

I'd borrowed a cane from the clinic—the crutches were too obvious, too pitiful. The cane let me pretend I had some dignity left. My dress hung loose on my frame. I'd lost weight I couldn't afford to lose.

The hospital's new wing gleamed in the autumn sun, all glass and steel and promise. Cameras flashed. Neighboring Alphas stood in clusters, their power rolling off them in waves that made my skin prickle. Nash stood at the center of it all, Anastasia at his side, her hand resting on her belly.

I made it halfway across the courtyard before she moved.

It happened fast. She stepped back as if startled, her foot hooking behind mine. I felt myself falling and couldn't stop it—my legs were too weak, my balance too far gone.

I hit the ground hard. The cane clattered away. Pain exploded through my hip and shoulder.

And Anastasia screamed.

"She pushed me!" Her voice was shrill, panicked, perfectly pitched for the cameras. "She tried to hurt my baby!"

I looked up from the pavement. Every eye was on me. The press. The Alphas. The pack.

And Nash, staring down at me with something that might have been disgust.

Nobody helped me up.