The link came on the tenth day, and this time it held.

I'd stopped expecting a schedule from Dane's end—the signal came when it came, thin and unpredictable as weather—but this one arrived with a different texture. Steadier. Like he'd found better ground to stand on.

*Kora. Still there?*

*I'm here.*

*Got more. Rogue's name is Callum. Neutral territory now, no pack ties, which is why he'll talk to me and not to anyone wearing a collar.* A pause, static crackling at the edges but not swallowing him whole. *He remembers the drop. Appalachian side. Family took her in—no affiliation, no pack politics. Working people. Name's Reyes.*

My chest went tight enough that I had to remind myself to breathe.

*Do they know? What she is?*

*No. Provenance paper said she was an abandoned pup, mother a rogue female, deceased. Clean story. Believable.* Another pause, longer this time, and I could feel the link straining like a rope pulled taut over a long distance. *They've raised her six years thinking they did something kind for a stranger's child.*

I pressed my palm flat against the stone floor. Six years. The same six years I'd spent singing another woman's daughter to sleep.

*Her name,* I said. *Do you have her name?*

*April.*

I said it once, silently, just to feel the shape of it. April.

*Is she safe?*

The signal buckled. His voice came through in torn pieces, words with the spaces eaten out of them.

*She is—loved—they don't—know—*

And then nothing. Just the dark, and the cold stone, and the sound of my own pulse loud in my ears.

I turned onto my side and pressed my forehead against the wall and stayed there, counting. Sixty seconds. I gave myself sixty seconds and not one more, because grief was a door I couldn't afford to leave open in this room. Then I sat up, wiped my face with the back of my wrist, and started mapping guard rotation again, because that was the only thing left that felt like doing something.

—

Holloway came the next morning with a new vial, larger than the others, and I knew before the needle touched my arm that something had changed.

"Dosage increase," he said, mostly to himself, the way he always narrated to no one. "Heart rate irregular. Peripheral vision narrowing per patient report." He glanced at me like I was a readout. "Any dizziness on standing?"

"Yes," I said, because lying cost more than it was worth.

He nodded, satisfied, and pushed the plunger.

The cold went in the way it always did—green and bitter, climbing my arm, settling behind my eyes. But underneath it, something else moved. Not weakness. Pressure. Like a hand pushing down on water and the water pushing back, finding the gaps between his fingers, patient and unbothered by the effort it was costing him.

Holloway didn't notice. He wrote his numbers, capped his vial, and left.

I lay there afterward with my palm on my ribs and felt her—my wolf—not whimpering anymore. Testing. Circling the edges of whatever was holding her down, slow and methodical, like something with all the time in the world.

*Not yet,* I told her.

She didn't answer. But she didn't stop either.

—

The ventilation grate sat high in the far corner of the cell, a rusted square I'd stopped paying attention to after the first week. So when I heard the scrape of claws against stone outside it—light, deliberate, gone almost before I registered it—I went still all the way down to my bones.

I crossed the cell and stood beneath the grate, listening. Footsteps retreating. A patrol pace. Even, unhurried, the gait of someone who wanted to look like she wasn't doing anything at all.

Something small dropped through the slats and landed by my feet.

A folded cloth, dust-colored, tied with a single loop of twine. I crouched and opened it with fingers that had gone unsteady in a way that had nothing to do with the wolfsbane.

A stub of charcoal. A torn corner of pack record paper, blank on one side.

I stared at it in the dark and felt something crack open in my chest that wasn't grief this time.

A way to write.

I closed my fist around the charcoal and turned toward the corridor, straining to hear whether the footsteps overhead were still retreating—

And froze.

They weren't. They were coming back.