I made it maybe two miles before my legs quit.

The forest floor came up fast. Pine needles in my mouth, dirt under my nails, the cold seeping through my dress. My neck burned where the mark used to be — not a clean burn, but a wet, dragging one, like someone had scooped something out of me and left the hole open to the air.

My wolf was silent. That was the worst part. Ten years of tonics had already made her thin and slow, but she'd always been *there*, a warm weight behind my ribs. Now there was just static.

I'm going to die out here, I thought. And nobody's going to look for me.

That's when I heard it.

Not a sound. Not exactly. It came from *inside*, in that private channel only a mate or a packmate can open — and I had neither anymore. A tiny pressure, like a fingertip pressed against the inside of my skull.

*Mama.*

I stopped breathing.

I'd been mind-linked my whole life. By my father. By Nolan. This wasn't like either. This was small and blurred at the edges, like someone whispering through water. And it wasn't really a word. It was a *feeling* that my brain translated into one.

"No," I whispered into the dirt. "No, I'm hallucinating. I'm bleeding out and I'm hallucinating."

The pressure came again. Warmer this time. Insistent.

*Safe. Get up. Safe.*

I rolled onto my back. Stars pushed through the branches overhead, cold and white. I pressed both hands flat against my stomach — still flat, barely six weeks along, nothing there yet but a rumor.

"You can't talk," I said out loud, because saying it made it feel less insane. "You're the size of a bean. Pups don't link until they're born. Sometimes not until they shift."

What came back wasn't an argument. It was a flood.

Images, or something like images. A silver-white brightness that made my eyes water even though they were closed. A sense of *height* — of standing above things, above packs, above Alphas, the way you'd feel standing on a mountain looking down at houses. And underneath all of it, threaded through it like a cord, a scent I had never smelled in my life but somehow recognized the way you recognize your own name.

And then a shape. Faint. A young man's face I'd never seen, laughing, gone in half a second.

*Xavier.*

I sat up so fast the trees tilted.

"Say that again."

*Xavier.* A pause. Then, softer, almost confused, like a child sounding out a word it had overheard: *Father.*

My hand went to my pocket. My phone was still there, screen cracked from the fall, battery at nine percent. I opened the photographs with shaking fingers and scrolled to the one I'd barely understood in Nolan's study.

*Source vial: XLR-V — Prince Xavier, Lycan Royal Repository.*

I read it four times.

I'd known the name Xavier the way everyone in our world knew it. The Lycan King's only son. Dead eleven months, a highway pileup on the Thanksgiving run, the whole werewolf world going quiet for a week. Nolan had made me wear black to the memorial broadcast.

Monica had wanted to plant a nobody's child in me. Some disgraced rogue, some nameless wolf, something dirty enough to burn me with. And Elias Warrick, that trembling coward of a healer, had taken twelve thousand dollars and reached into the wrong repository shelf.

A laugh came out of me. It was an ugly, cracked sound, and it turned into something else halfway through, and I sat in the dirt with blood drying on my collar and shook.

Nolan had rejected me in front of three hundred wolves for carrying a bastard.

He'd rejected me for carrying the last living heir to the Lycan throne.

"Okay," I said, when I could speak. I wiped my face with the heel of my hand. "Okay. Which way?"

The warmth in my chest turned — actually *turned*, like a compass needle settling — and pulled north.

---

It took three days.

I want to say I was brave. I wasn't. I was slow and stupid with pain, and I couldn't shift — I tried, on the first morning, and all I got was my spine locking up and bile in my throat. Wolfsbane doesn't leave. It settles into you like silt.

So I walked.

I drank from a creek and threw it back up. I ate blackberries until my hands were purple. I slept curled in a hollow under a fallen cedar with my arms crossed over my stomach, and every few hours the phantom ache would rise up through my neck and my body would try to reach for a bond that wasn't there anymore — reaching and reaching into empty space, like a tongue going back to a pulled tooth.

Every time it happened, the pup pushed warmth at me. No words. Just heat, steady and patient, right under my hands.

"I know," I'd whisper. "I know. I've got you."

On the third night the trees changed. Older, taller, spaced strangely wide, and the air went heavy in a way that pressed down on the back of my neck. Boundary stones — black granite, older than any pack marker I'd ever seen, carved with a crescent I only knew from history books.

I stepped over the line.

They came out of the dark so fast I didn't see them move.

Four of them, half-shifted, seven feet at the shoulder of their crouch, claws in the dirt. The aura hit me like a wall of water. My knees went — I couldn't have stopped it, no pack wolf could — and I hit the ground on all fours, gasping.

"Rogue." The voice above me was gravel. "Territory's closed. Turn around and start walking, or you go back in pieces."

"I'm not—" My voice came out shredded. "I need to see the King."

Someone laughed. A hand closed on my upper arm, hard enough to bruise, hauling me toward the boundary line.

Then the one on the left went still.

He'd been half-turned away. Now his head came around slowly, nostrils flaring, and he took one step toward me. Another. He dropped into a crouch in front of me and leaned in — not toward my throat, not toward my ruined mark.

Toward my stomach.

He breathed in.

The silence that followed had teeth in it.

"Vance," one of the others said. "What."

Vance didn't answer. When he lifted his head, his eyes had gone wide and pale, and something in his face had come apart.

"Let her go," he said quietly.

"She's a rogue with a busted mark, she's—"

"*Let her go.*" He was already stripping off his jacket, already draping it over my shoulders like I was made of glass. His hands were shaking. "Get the north gate open. Now. And somebody wake the King."

The hand released my arm. All four of them shifted at once — not in front of me anymore, but around me, flanking, one at each shoulder and two behind, the formation you use for something you'd die before you dropped.

Vance offered me his arm to lean on. He wouldn't look at my face.

"Can you walk, my lady?" he asked.

*My lady.*

I put my hand on his arm and I walked.

The royal court smelled like snow and old stone, even though it was warm inside. Vance walked me through halls taller than anything Ironridge had ever built, his jacket still around my shoulders, his grip steady under my elbow like he thought I might shatter if he let go. Maybe I would have.

Then the doors at the end of the hall opened, and I stopped thinking about anything except staying upright.

The Lycan King was bigger than I expected, even though every story I'd ever heard said he would be. He rose from a chair that looked more like a throne pretending not to be one, and the air in the room changed the second he stood — pressure, the kind that made my knees want to buckle out of pure animal instinct. I locked them and stayed standing. I'd knelt enough for one lifetime.

Alaric crossed the floor toward me slowly, like a man approaching something he didn't trust himself around. Three feet away, he stopped. His nostrils flared once. Twice.

I watched a king come undone in real time.

His face didn't crumple, not exactly. It was worse than that — it went perfectly still, the way a held breath goes still, and his eyes, gold-flecked and ancient-looking, dropped to my stomach and stayed there.

"Say your name," he said. His voice had dropped so low I felt it more than heard it.

"Bella Greene." My own voice came out cracked, scraped raw from three days of walking. "I was Luna of Ironridge. I'm not anymore."

"That scent." He said it like an accusation, like I'd stolen something. "That is my son's bloodline." His jaw worked. "That is *my son.*"

"I know," I said. "I didn't know until three nights ago. I have proof — papers, a healer's confession, a name on a vial—"

"The ritual. Now." He didn't raise his voice, but the words landed like a command shouted across a battlefield. A woman in gray robes was already moving, already carrying a shallow silver basin toward us, and I understood, distantly, that I had no choice in this even if I'd wanted one.

I didn't want one.

"Your wrist," the healer said gently.

I held it out without hesitation. What did I have left to protect? They could cut me open and I'd have nothing left to lose that Nolan hadn't already taken.

The blade was thin, almost gentle. Three drops of my blood fell into the basin, dark red against silver, and the healer murmured words in a language older than any pack law I'd ever studied. For a moment nothing happened. I heard my own heartbeat, too loud, and somewhere behind it, a smaller flutter that wasn't mine.

Then the basin lit gold.

Not a glow. A blaze — light pouring up out of liquid like something had been unlocked, throwing shifting gold across the ceiling, across Alaric's face, across the stunned, silent guards lining the walls.

A woman's voice broke the silence with a sound I can only call a sob torn loose after being held too long.

Seraphina crossed the room before I even registered she'd moved, and then her arms were around me, fierce and shaking, her face pressed into my hair. She smelled like lilies and grief and something warmer underneath both.

"He's alive," she said into my shoulder, over and over, like she couldn't stop. "Some part of him is alive."

I stood there and let a queen weep on me, my own eyes burning, my hand pressed flat against her back because I didn't know what else to do with it.

Alaric hadn't moved. He stared at the gold light in the basin like it might vanish if he blinked. When he finally turned to me, his composure had come back together, but wrong somehow — reforged into something harder.

"Whoever did this to you," he said, and every syllable carried the weight of every law I had ever been afraid of, "will answer to the Crown."

I believed him. God help me, I believed him completely.

---

They gave me a room with a bed too soft to trust and a Lycan Guard posted outside the door like I was made of glass and gold both. That night, from the window, I watched Alaric walk the length of the hall alone and stop outside a door I hadn't noticed before — plain, unremarkable, except for the way his hand rested on the frame like it might crumble under his palm.

He stood there a long time. Then he closed it, quietly, and walked away.

I sat cross-legged on the bed with Buster's absence sitting in my chest like a stone — I hadn't let myself think about him in three days and now I couldn't stop — and pulled my journal from the bottom of my bag, corners soft with ten years of handling.

Date. Dosage. Symptom. Date. Dosage. Symptom.

I worked through the night, turning ten years of silent suffering into something with edges sharp enough to cut.