The cold from the moonstone staff still buzzed against the base of my skull, a phantom ache that wouldn’t let me forget where I was or what I’d just lost. If I closed my eyes, I could almost smell the iron tang of blood in the font. But shutting them only made the memories surge up harder—the truth-compulsion had opened something in me, and now the past wouldn’t stop spilling out, thick and raw.

She stole more than my brooch—she stole my voice.

I don’t remember the exact moment I realized it. Maybe it was gradual, a slow unthreading of self that started years ago, long before Ethan or Ironveil or the day my body became a battleground. But the first time Victoria Hollow wrapped her arms around me, crying soft and desperate into the crook of my neck, I believed her.

I was eighteen. Still new enough to Ironveil that the packhouse felt like a cage dressed up as a home. The day Victoria came back from boarding school, the whole house was thrown into a fever of preparation. Polished silver, new candles, a roast in the oven that made my stomach twist with longing. Ethan barely said a word that morning—he was always quieter around family, a tension I’d learned to read but never dared to name.

When Victoria finally arrived, it was all at once—door swinging wide, her arms flung around Ethan’s neck, her dark hair spilling down his back. Then she turned to me, eyes shiny with tears, and pressed herself into my chest as if she’d known me her whole life.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she sobbed, her fingers cold on my bare arms. “Ethan told me everything. I’ll love you like a sister, I promise. Like a real one.”

I remember standing there, stiff, feeling the weight of her head against my shoulder. I wanted to believe her. I wanted family so badly it made my teeth ache. For twenty minutes, she cried. For twenty minutes, I patted her back, awkward and hopeful, letting her grief—real or not—bleed into me like ink into water.

Three days later, I found my grandmother’s last letter was missing. I’d kept it hidden, pressed between the pages of my diary, the paper soft with age, still carrying the faintest scent of lavender and smoke. It wasn’t just a letter—it was a goodbye I’d never gotten to say out loud. The words were mine, written by a hand that shook, full of the things I wanted to believe about myself.

I tore the room apart looking for it. Under the mattress, behind the loose brick in the wall, between the dresses in my closet. Nothing. I told myself I’d misplaced it. That the housekeeper had moved it while dusting. That I was being foolish.

A week later, Victoria read it at the dinner table.

She passed it off as a tribute to her father—a poem she claimed she’d written in his honor, words thick with loss and longing. Only I recognized the lines, the way they caught in her throat just the way they’d caught in mine the night I wrote them. No one else noticed. Everyone wept. Even Ethan’s eyes went soft and wet at the edges.

"How poetic," someone said. "You have such a gift, Victoria."

I sat there, hands folded in my lap, nails biting into my palms. I didn’t speak. I didn’t accuse. I just watched her, watched the way her eyes flicked to me, a small, secret smile playing at the corners of her mouth. She wanted me to see. She wanted me to know.

That was only the beginning.

For the next three years, Victoria made a slow, deliberate study of me. At first, it was subtle—little things, little thefts. She started wearing her hair the way I did, loose braids tucked behind her ears, wisps left to frame her face. She borrowed my sweaters, my shoes, the silver hairpin my grandmother had given me. Once, I found her in the hall before a pack gathering, twisting her mouth in the mirror, practicing my smile.

She started mimicking my voice, too. The way I said Ethan’s name when I was tired, the lilt I used when I was nervous. At first, I thought I was imagining it. But the others noticed. They started to laugh about it, calling us twins, sisters in every way that mattered.

Victoria’s favorite game was to sit behind me on the rug, fingers deft and gentle, weaving my hair into intricate braids. She’d hum under her breath—a song I’d taught her, once, before I’d learned better.

One afternoon, she twisted a lock of my hair around her finger, her grip just tight enough to sting. “We're sisters now, Wren. Twins, almost. Won’t it be funny if Ethan one day can’t tell us apart in the dark?”

She said it softly, eyes dead and empty, her hands so careful they could have been loving.

I didn’t answer. I kept my face blank, let her finish the braid, and told myself that if I stayed very still, she might get bored. She never did.

She took my laugh next. My way of tilting my head when I teased Ethan. My habit of tracing the edge of my cup with my thumb when I was thinking. She watched, she learned, she claimed. By the end of that third year, she’d even taken the only thing I thought was mine alone—the mark at the base of my neck, the one Nathan told me to hide. I found her in her room one morning, the neckline of her dress slipping low enough to reveal a new tattoo, fresh and silver and shaped exactly like the flower that bloomed beneath my hairline.

She caught me staring. She smiled, slow and secret.

“Now we match,” she whispered.

The memory flickered, then faded, and I was back in the present—strapped on the treatment table, the cold light glaring down, the weight of the pack’s eyes pressing in from every side. My body felt hollow, scraped clean, as if the staff had scooped out everything that was still mine.

I squeezed my eyes shut. The room faded. In the darkness behind my lids, I could hear Victoria’s voice—a whisper at first, then louder, clearer, cutting through the fog of pain and memory.

She was speaking to Ethan. I couldn’t see her, but I didn’t have to. I knew the shape of her body pressed close to his, the angle of her face turned up toward his ear. I knew the exact cadence she would use—soft, pleading, the way I’d spoken to him three months ago, the night I begged him not to shut me out.

“Please, Ethan,” she murmured, her voice my voice, her words the ones I’d thought were safe. “I know you’re angry, but I can’t breathe when you’re like this. I need you.”

Ethan’s shoulders tensed. For the first time since they’d strapped me down, his brow furrowed—just a flicker, a shadow passing across his face. But he didn’t turn. He didn’t look at me. He let her words—my words—curl around him like smoke, and he kept his eyes fixed on some point beyond the edge of the table.

Victoria kept talking, kept weaving her web. I could feel her watching me, daring me to speak, to break, to scream. I didn’t. I lay there, silent, listening to the echo of my own voice coming from her lips, and wondered how much of me was left for her to take.

The air in the room shifted, heavy with things unsaid. Something in me hardened. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, tasting iron and defiance, and waited. Outside, the wind rattled the old stained glass, and somewhere deep inside the church, a door slammed closed.

I opened my eyes.

Victoria’s eyes met mine across the room—dark, unblinking, full of secrets. She smiled, just a little. And I understood, finally, what it meant to be hollowed out by someone who wanted you not dead, but empty.

The straps on my wrists tightened as Soren checked them, his hands clinical and indifferent. I didn’t fight. I didn’t beg.

I watched Victoria, and I waited for the next thing she would take.

I found it on a Tuesday.

Not because I was looking for proof of anything in particular. I was looking for a reason. Something small and human I could hold in my hands and say: *this* is why he stopped touching me. *This* is why he moved my things to the west wing without a word, without a fight, without even the dignity of an explanation.

The west wing smelled like old wood and disuse. The mattress dipped on one side. I'd been sleeping in the shape of someone's absence for three months.

I needed a reason.

Ethan's study was locked, but I'd found the spare key two years ago, tucked behind the loose brick near the fireplace—the same place he kept everything he thought I'd never look for. I told myself I was only going to look. I told myself I'd put everything back.

The painting hung on the north wall. A winter landscape, all gray and silver, the kind of thing that gets chosen because it offends no one. I'd always hated it. Too careful. Too composed.

I lifted it off the hook.

The leather folder behind it was dark brown, worn soft at the corners, the kind of thing that gets handled often. I stood there for a moment with the painting balanced against my knee and the folder in my other hand, and I thought: *whatever is in here, you cannot unknow it.*

I opened it anyway.

The medical reports were on top. Ironveil Pack Medical—the seal in the upper corner, the date three months back. I skimmed the first page fast, the way you do when you're hoping to find something boring. Test results. Blood panels. The kind of thing that means nothing.

Then I hit the diagnosis.

*Bloodrot.*

I knew the word. Everyone in Ironveil knew the word the way you know the names of things that happen to other people. Wolfsblood corruption. The body turning against itself from the inside out, the blood going thick and wrong, the organs following one by one. Rare. Untreatable by conventional means. The survival statistics weren't statistics so much as they were a formality.

Ethan's name was at the top of the page.

The projected survival timeline had been crossed out and rewritten three times. The first estimate: six months. The second: ninety days. The third—the most recent, the ink still slightly darker than the rest—was not a timeline at all.

It was a condition.

*Without access to activated Silverblood from a gestating maternal source: multi-organ failure within 72 hours of the next full moon.*

I read that sentence four times.

The full moon was in forty-one days.

Someone had circled the date in red.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough that my arms started to ache from holding the painting. Long enough that the light through the study window shifted from gray to gold and back again. I set the painting down against the wall. I sat on the edge of Ethan's desk—the one I was never supposed to sit on, the one where he kept his correspondence in neat, alphabetical order—and I read the report again from the beginning.

He was dying.

He had been dying for months.

And he had said nothing.

I turned to the next page. And the next. Test results, specialist notes, a second opinion from a pack physician in the east territory who had written his conclusion in careful, apologetic language that still managed to say: *there is nothing we can do.*

And then I reached the bottom of the folder.

The last sheet of paper was not a medical document.

It was handwritten. The script was small and precise and I knew it before I'd read a single word, because I had spent three years watching those hands move—across dinner tables, across Ethan's shoulders, across my belongings when she thought I wasn't watching.

Victoria's handwriting.

I read it slowly. I made myself go slowly, because I knew if I rushed I would miss something, and I could not afford to miss anything.

She had titled it *Treatment Protocol.*

Step one: confirm target pregnancy.

Step two: fabricate assault allegations to establish legal grounds for compulsion.

Step three: public truth-compulsion ceremony—maximum stress, maximum activation of Silverblood properties.

Step four: *Maternal collapse during compulsion results in natural miscarriage. Fetal blood collectable in full. No medical intervention required. No explanation necessary.*

The paper didn't shake. My hands did.

I set it down on the desk very carefully, the way you set down something that might detonate if you're not precise about it. I smoothed the corner that had bent when I grabbed it. I looked at it for a long moment.

Then I put it back.

Exactly where I'd found it. Exactly as I'd found it.

I rehung the painting. I straightened it twice—once because it was crooked, once because my hands needed something to do.

I locked the study behind me.

In the hallway, I stood with my back against the wall and I breathed. In. Out. The kind of breathing that isn't about calm, just about continuing to function.

*If he knew and stayed silent, he stops being my mate the second I find out. If he didn't know, I still owe him one warning. One.*

That was all I gave myself. One clean thought, no tears, no spiral. I had learned a long time ago—standing barefoot on iron spikes, waiting for a door to open—that falling apart was a luxury you paid for later with interest. I couldn't afford it then. I couldn't afford it now.

I walked back to the west wing.

I sat on the edge of the sagging mattress in the room that smelled like disuse and old wood, and I pressed both hands flat against my stomach. Still flat. Still quiet. Three months along and barely showing, just a slight fullness that I'd been hiding under loose dresses and careful posture.

I'd never spoken to the baby out loud before.

It felt strange. It felt necessary.

"Baby," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "If your father comes to me tonight and tells me the truth, we live. If he doesn't—"

I paused.

Outside, the wind moved through the old eaves of the packhouse, a low, mournful sound.

"—we make him remember us forever."

I sat there for a long time after that, hands still pressed to my stomach, listening to the sounds of the house settle around me. Footsteps in the corridor. Distant voices. The creak of the main staircase.

Ethan's footsteps had a particular weight to them. I knew them the way you know the rhythm of something you've been listening for.

They passed my door without slowing.

I heard him continue down the hall. Heard the soft click of the master bedroom door closing.

I took my hands off my stomach.

He didn't come.

The moonstone staff's hum changed pitch.

I felt it before anyone else did—a vibration that started in my back teeth and traveled down my spine, wrong in a way I couldn't name. Healer Elara's hands had gone still above my temples. The chanting that had filled the stone room for the last ten minutes stuttered, then stopped.

Something was reversing.

The font's surface—that shallow basin of pale water set into the wall, the one that was supposed to catch my memories like light through a prism and project them outward—had gone dark. Not empty dark. Dense dark. The kind that precedes something.

Elara took a step back. Her face had drained of color.

"The Silverblood," she whispered. "It's—it's not reading her. It's reading—"

The first image bloomed across the stone wall like smoke unfolding.

It wasn't my face.

It was Victoria's.

Not the Victoria who stood at the edge of the room with her careful smile and her dark, patient eyes. This Victoria was fourteen years old, sitting cross-legged on a bathroom floor, holding a candle. The flame was small and orange and ordinary. She held her palm flat above it, steady, not flinching, letting the heat climb toward her skin.

The room had gone completely silent.

I watched from the table, strapped down, unable to look away, as the young Victoria pressed her palm into the flame. Held it there for three full seconds. Then she looked up at the mirror above the sink—at herself—and her face crumpled into something spectacular. Tears. A trembling lip. A grief so precise it looked rehearsed, because it was.

Her voice, thin and young, filled the treatment room:

*"I need something dramatic for the day he chooses her over me."*

No one moved.

Two hundred wolves, packed into the gallery above and the floor below, and not one of them made a sound. I could hear my own heartbeat. I could hear the wet, labored rhythm of my breathing, the blood still moving through me in slow, heavy pulses.

The image shifted.

Victoria, older now—maybe nineteen, twenty. The kitchen of the packhouse, late at night, the only light coming from the range hood. She had a small glass bottle in her hand. Dark liquid. She tilted it carefully over a teacup, counted the drops with the concentration of someone who had practiced this exact motion. Three drops. Four.

She poured the tea down the drain.

Then she carried the empty cup to the hallway outside my old bedroom door and set it down on the floor. Arranged it so it looked like it had been kicked over. Stepped back. Looked at it. Adjusted the angle.

Then she opened her mouth and screamed.

The sound of running footsteps. Ethan's voice, distant and alarmed. Victoria spinning toward the sound, her face already wet, already broken, already falling into his arms before he'd even rounded the corner—

*"She did something to my tea, Ethan, I felt sick the moment I drank it, I didn't want to say anything but this isn't the first time—"*

I pressed my head back against the table. The leather strap across my chest felt like the only thing holding me together.

She'd been doing it for years.

Years.

The third memory came without warning—Victoria standing in my old room, holding the silver pendant my grandmother had left me, the one I'd thought I'd lost during the move to the west wing. She was speaking to someone off-frame, her voice flat and businesslike, stripped of everything soft.

*"The pendant or the pack."* A pause. *"She can have one. Not both. Make sure she believes you when you tell her which one you're choosing."*

I turned my head away. I couldn't—

I looked back anyway.

Because the fourth memory had already started, and something in the room had changed. The quality of the silence had shifted. It had weight now, a pressure that pushed against the eardrums. Even Soren had gone still beside me, his hands no longer moving.

The font projected a desk. A lamp. Victoria's hands, older—her hands now, the ones I knew—opening a black notebook with careful, deliberate fingers. The pages were dense with small handwriting, columns of dates and numbers and names. Medical terminology. Pack physician seals.

Ethan's name. Over and over. At the top of every page.

She turned to the first entry. The date was eighteen months ago.

I recognized the document. I had found its duplicate in the leather folder behind the painting—the Ironveil Pack Medical seal, the bloodrot diagnosis, the projected survival timeline. I had held that paper in my hands and thought I understood what it meant.

I hadn't understood anything.

Because the date on Victoria's copy was three months earlier than the one Ethan had been given.

She'd had it first. She'd had all of them first—every specialist report, every revised prognosis, every updated timeline. Each one arrived in her hands a full season before Ethan ever saw it. She hadn't been searching for a cure. She hadn't been sitting at her brother's bedside in helpless grief, the devoted sister, the only family he had left.

She had been managing the information. Controlling what he knew, and when. Keeping him sick enough to need her, and just healthy enough to be useful.

The notebook page turned.

And turned again.

Somewhere above me, someone in the gallery made a sound—not a word, just a sound, the involuntary noise a person makes when they see something that cannot be unseen. Then another voice. Then a third. The gallery was beginning to fracture, the silence cracking open from the inside.

I turned my head toward Ethan.

He was standing at the edge of my peripheral vision, his back half-turned to me the way it had been for the entire ceremony. But he wasn't looking at the font anymore. He wasn't looking at the wall.

He was looking at Victoria.

I watched him turn. Fully, slowly, the way a man turns when he already knows what he's going to see and has decided to see it anyway. His face was—

I didn't have a word for his face.

Victoria was still smiling.

Not the soft, wounded smile she used on him. Not the careful, patient one she used on me. This was something else—smaller, almost private, the smile of a person who has run a very long race and can finally see the finish line.

Her pupils were contracting.

And then the warmth came again.

Not warmth. I knew it wasn't warmth. I'd known for the last ten minutes what it was and I'd been refusing to name it, because naming it made it real, and real meant—

Elara's voice cut through everything.

"The pup—" Her voice broke. Came back louder, ragged, stripped of all professional composure. "The pup—it's already gone—she's hemorrhaging—"

The gallery erupted.

Voices, movement, the crash of someone knocking over an instrument tray. Soren's hands suddenly everywhere, urgent and no longer indifferent. Elara calling for pressure, for cloth, for something, her training finally overriding her shock.

I lay still.

I lay still because there was nothing left to fight with. The Silverblood that had reversed the staff's compulsion and laid Victoria's entire architecture of cruelty across these walls—it had taken everything I had left to give. My body was empty in a way that had nothing to do with blood loss, though there was plenty of that too.

Through the chaos, through the shouting and the running feet and the sound of the font finally going dark and silent, I found Victoria's face one more time.

She was still watching me.

And then—behind her, beyond her, through the treatment room's heavy door that someone had just thrown open—

A man.

Soaked through. Dark hair plastered to his face, rain still dripping from his coat onto the stone floor. He stood in the doorway and the room's cold light caught his face, and I didn't know him.

I didn't know him at all.

But Lyra—the part of me that had been silent and submerged for months, the wolf I'd almost forgotten I still had—

She went very quiet.

Not frightened.

The way an animal goes quiet when it recognizes something it thought was lost.