The laundry pile came first.

I found Dylan's shirts folded into my basket the next morning, still warm from someone else's iron, tucked between the grey uniforms like they belonged there. I didn't need to ask who put them there. I just carried the basket to the wash house and did the work, because that's what an Omega does, and I was an Omega now.

By midday there was a box outside my cot. Inside: a scarf that smelled like Dylan, sprayed twice, maybe three times, so the whole corridor would catch it walking past. A note in Arianna's loopy handwriting. *Thought you'd want a piece of him back.* I folded the scarf, set it on the shelf, and didn't touch it again.

At the morning run, Dylan stood on the porch steps in his Alpha stance, chest out, voice carrying over two hundred wolves stretching and yawning in the cold.

"Luna Arianna's investiture is in one week," he announced. "All Omega staff will serve. Foster—" he said my name like it was a job title, not a person, "—you're assigned to drink service. Personally requested."

I heard the laughter ripple somewhere behind me, quiet, careful, the kind that knows it's cruel and does it anyway. I said, "Yes, Alpha," because those were the only two words I was allowed, and I went back to scrubbing the porch rail.

But I was watching now. That was new. I watched Old Ferris flinch when Arianna's voice hit a certain pitch. I watched Delta Wren's jaw tighten every time Dylan touched her shoulder in passing. Not everyone here loved their new Luna. I started keeping a list in my head, name by name, face by face. It cost me nothing and it felt, for the first time in days, like doing something instead of just enduring it.

The investiture came fast. I stood at the edge of the hall in grey, a silver tray balanced on my forearm, pouring wine into glasses held by people who used to ask my opinion on pack matters. Dylan stood at the front with the Luna pendant — my pendant, the one I'd thrown at his feet and heard skid against Arianna's heel — polished now, gleaming, no trace of the floor it had touched.

He clasped it around her throat. The whole hall applauded.

"A toast," Arianna said, lifting her glass, looking straight at me over the rim. "To new beginnings." Then, louder, sweeter, aimed like a blade: "Omega Twelve, refill the front table."

Twelve. Not Maisie. Twelve.

I felt every eye in that room slide toward me to see if I'd crack. My hand did not shake. I refilled the glass at the front table, and the woman holding it wouldn't meet my eyes, and I moved on to the next one, and the next, steady as a metronome.

Something inside me didn't break that night. It had already broken, weeks ago, in pieces too small to name. What happened at that table was different — it felt like the pieces stopped scattering and started stacking themselves into something with weight. I didn't know what it was yet. I only knew I stopped flinching somewhere between the third glass and the fourth.

Sylvie found me two days later, elbow-deep in a bucket of grey wash water behind the kennels. She'd come on an alliance errand — border patrols, some shared hunting ground dispute, routine Beta business between Ashfell and Thornwood. She took one look at my hands, rope-burned from hauling feed sacks, and one look at the grey dress, and her whole face went still in a way I recognized. Sylvie's still face was worse than her angry one.

"Who did this," she said. Not a question.

"Sylvie—"

"Who did this, Maisie."

I told her. All of it, low and fast, while she stood there with her hand resting on the blade at her hip like it might decide something on its own. When I finished, she didn't say a word for a long moment. Then: "Come to Ashfell. Tonight. I'll carry you across the line myself if I have to."

"I can't."

"You can. Watch me make it simple."

"I have no wolf, Sylvie. No pack. I'd walk into your Alpha's territory as nothing. A charity case with rope burns." My voice cracked on the last word, the first crack in days, and I hated it. "I won't do that to you. Or to me."

She didn't argue after that — Sylvie never wastes breath on a fight she can see she'll lose — but she pressed something small and smooth into my palm before she left. A comm stone, warm from her hand.

"One word," she said, "and I come. Doesn't matter what it costs me."

I closed my fingers around it and didn't cry until she was gone.

The fevers started on a Tuesday, or I think it was a Tuesday. Days had stopped mattering much in grey.

I was folding sheets in the linen room when the heat hit me sideways, like someone had opened an oven door against my face. My knees buckled. I caught myself on the shelf, sheets sliding to the floor, and by the time the dizziness passed my nose was bleeding onto the white cotton I'd just folded. Bright red on bleached white. I stared at it for a second too long before I remembered to move.

I scrubbed the stain out with cold water and told no one.

It happened again two days later, worse. And then a third time, in the middle of the yard, in front of Delta Wren, who looked at me with something that wasn't quite pity and wasn't quite fear. "You should see the healer," she said, and walked away before I could answer.

I didn't need to see Nessa. Nessa found me.

She caught my wrist in the hallway outside the kennels, her thumb pressing hard against my pulse point, her eyes doing that clinical sweep she used to do when I was Luna and my only ailments were exhaustion and stress. "You're running hot," she said. "How long has this been happening?"

"A week. Maybe more."

She didn't say anything else. But I saw her go straight to Dylan's study that evening, and I saw her come out twenty minutes later not meeting anyone's eyes, and the next morning the little brown bottle in my hand was heavier — the dose doubled, the taste sharper, bitter enough to make my throat close on the way down.

I drank it anyway. Seven years of believing it was medicine doesn't die because your nose bleeds.

The day after that, I was carrying an armful of fresh linens down the east corridor when I heard voices through the crack of Dylan's study door. I wasn't trying to listen. I want that on record too — I wasn't trying to hear anything. But my feet stopped on their own, the way a body stops before the mind decides to.

"—suppression's not holding the way it used to," Nessa was saying, low and clipped. "Her scent shifted twice this week. Old Ferris asked me about it. I told him it was stress."

"It has to hold." Dylan's voice, flat, the tone he used for pack business, not for me. "If the bloodline surfaces before I've — not yet. Not yet, Nessa."

The linens were suddenly very heavy in my arms. *Bloodline.* *Surfaces.* The word sat wrong in my chest, like a stone dropped into still water, rings spreading out before I understood what had broken the surface.

The door opened. Dylan stepped out and found me standing there, arms full of white cotton, face doing whatever my face does when I'm caught.

He didn't even blink. That was the thing about Dylan — he never had to scramble for a lie, because to him it was never a lie. He straightened his cuffs.

"You heard wrong," he said, gentle, patient, the voice he used to use when I cried over small things early in our bond. "We were talking about your instability. The fevers. The nosebleeds." He tilted his head, and something in his eyes went soft in a way that used to make my chest ache with gratitude. "I'm worried about you, Maisie. The tinctures are the only thing keeping your wolf from tearing you apart from the inside. You remember what happened before we started them. Do you want to go back to that? Do you want to end up like her — gone, silent, nothing left?"

I didn't remember what happened before. I never had. But he said it with such certainty that the memory I didn't have felt more real than the one I did.

"No," I said. "I don't want that."

"Then trust me." He touched my shoulder, brief, proprietary. "Go on. Finish your rounds."

I walked away with the linens. My hands were shaking. Not from the fever this time.

He started coming to my room after dark that week. Not with tenderness — I'd stopped expecting that the night the mark went cold — but with the particular hunger of a man checking that a lock still holds. He'd sit on the edge of my cot, uninvited, and tell me things in a voice gone soft and reasonable.

"You were never strong enough to be Luna," he told me the first night. "The rejection was a mercy, Maisie. You'll see that eventually."

"Arianna's wolf is everything a Thornwood Alpha deserves," he told me the second. "Strong. Simple. Not — complicated, like yours."

The third night he didn't say much at all. He just sat there, watching me the way you watch something you own to make sure it hasn't moved.

I said nothing through all three. Some old, worn-down part of me still thought silence was safety.

On the fourth night, when the door creaked open and his shadow fell across the cot, something in me had finished stacking itself into shape.

"Get out," I said. Not loud. Not shaking. "And don't come back."

He went very still. For a long moment he just looked at me, like he was recalculating something that had always added up before. Then he left, and the door clicked shut, and I sat alone in the dark with my heart slamming against my ribs.

The words hadn't killed me. I said them again, into the empty room, just to hear them a second time.

"Get out."

Nothing answered. But nothing broke, either. And for the first time in weeks, that felt like enough.

Arianna brought an audience for this one. Two of her chosen she-wolves flanked her like she was inspecting troops instead of a wash station, their noses wrinkled at the smell of lye and wet copper. I kept scrubbing until her shadow fell across the pot in my hands.

"Stop," she said. "Let me see."

I set the pot on the drying rack. She picked it up like it might bite her, turned it under the lamp, and found the one smear I'd missed along the base — a thumbnail's width of tarnish I hadn't caught in the dim morning light.

"Look at this." She held it up for the block to see, and every Omega in the room found somewhere else to put their eyes. "This is exactly what I'd expect. A wolf too defective to keep her own mate can't even keep a pot clean."

The two she-wolves laughed on cue, the kind of laugh that's been rehearsed in a mirror. I didn't say anything. I'd learned that silence gave her less to work with than words did.

She set the pot down, turned to go, then paused like she'd forgotten something small and pleasant. "Oh — Dylan told me, by the way. Said your wolf was always a disappointment. Even before." She smiled at me the way you'd smile at a stray dog that had stopped barking. "Just thought you'd want to know it wasn't only the wolfsbane. Some things are just broken from the start."

She left with her entourage trailing scent and laughter down the corridor. I stood there with my hands in cooling water and felt the words land somewhere behind my ribs, expecting them to hurt the way they would have a month ago.

They didn't. Not the way she wanted.

I set the pot down without a sound and reached for the next one.

Brin, the young Omega two stations down, caught my eye. She was maybe nineteen, all sharp elbows and careful movements, the kind of girl who'd learned early to make herself small. Her face did something complicated — sympathy, fear of being seen having sympathy, the particular flinch of someone who wants to say something and knows better. I gave her the smallest nod I could manage. Not much. Enough.

I was still counting. Arianna's name had been on my list for weeks.

Dylan made the announcement at the evening gathering, standing on the porch the way he always did, chest out, voice pitched to carry to the last row.

"Three days from now, Thornwood hosts the alliance gathering in the neutral grounds. Ashfell, Redbrook, and the Marrow packs will attend." A pause, the kind he used to let importance settle. "Serving staff will be drawn from Omega ranks." His eyes found me in the crowd, and something in his face wanted me to know this part was for me. "Foster will be among them."

I understood exactly what he was doing. Every visiting Alpha would see the former Luna of Thornwood pouring their wine in grey wool, proof laid out on a silver tray that Dylan Harper's authority was absolute enough to survive even discarding a mate. A trophy of his own making.

I kept my face still. "Yes, Alpha."

That night, in the dark behind the kennels, I turned Sylvie's comm stone over in my palm until it warmed. I didn't send words — we'd agreed on that, back when she pressed it into my hand. Just a pulse, a single press of my thumb, and the promise underneath it: *Ashfell delegation — bring yourself.*

I didn't know yet what I wanted her to see. Only that I wanted a friend's eyes in that clearing when Dylan paraded me in front of the packs like a lesson.

The morning of the gathering, I was loading crates of wine onto the serving cart when Nessa found me, the little brown bottle already in her hand.

"Here," she said, and pressed it into my palm the way she always did — quick, businesslike, eyes somewhere over my shoulder.

But this time I didn't move to drink it. I held it up to the grey morning light instead, watching the liquid catch and swirl, thinking of the word I'd heard through a cracked study door. *Bloodline. Surfaces.* Thinking of Nessa's voice, low and clipped, telling Dylan the suppression wasn't holding.

She watched me look at it longer than I ever had before. Something crossed her face — not quite concern, not quite guilt, some third thing I didn't have a name for yet, gone as fast as it came.

"Standing order," she said again, softer this time, like she needed to say it more than I needed to hear it.

I closed my fingers around the glass. "I know."

I didn't drink it. I slid it into the pocket of my grey dress, felt the small cold weight of it settle against my hip, and picked up the next crate.

Nessa didn't stop me. She just watched me walk to the carts, and for the first time in seven years, I wondered if some part of her had been waiting for exactly this.