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.
The neutral grounds smelled like cedar smoke and unfamiliar packs — pine from the Marrow delegation, something coppery from Redbrook, a clean cold scent I couldn't place at all. I moved through it with a tray balanced on my forearm, pouring wine into cups I didn't recognize, for Alphas who didn't know my name used to mean something.
Sylvie stood near the east entrance exactly where she said she'd be, Ashfell colors on her collar, arms crossed like she was bored. She wasn't bored. Her eyes tracked me every time I crossed the clearing, quick and precise, a soldier counting exits.
The stranger was harder to place. He stood apart from every delegation, dressed in dark Court livery none of the packs wore, and he didn't eat, didn't drink, didn't make the small polite noises everyone else made to fill silence. He watched. Three times in twenty minutes his gaze found me and stayed a beat too long, like he was trying to place a smell he couldn't name. I told myself it didn't matter. Omegas don't get to wonder why someone looks at them.
Dylan held court at the center of it all, Arianna on his arm in green silk, laughing at exactly the right moments. "Thornwood has never been stronger," he told Alpha Corvin of Redbrook, and Corvin nodded like he believed it, but his eyes drifted past Dylan's shoulder to me twice, then a third time, something assessing in his face that made Arianna's smile go thin at the edges.
She found an excuse within the hour. "The perimeter decorations," she said to her two shadows, loud enough for anyone nearby to hear. "I want to check them before the toasts." Her eyes cut to me. "Omega Twelve. Come hold the lantern."
I set down my tray and followed her toward the boundary line, where the silver-thorn fence marked the edge of neutral ground, strung with lanterns for the occasion. Her two she-wolves trailed us, already smirking, already knowing the shape of what was coming.
"You're standing wrong," Arianna said, not looking at me, examining a lantern like it had personally offended her. "Shoulders back. You used to know how to hold yourself. Or did that leave with your wolf?"
I said nothing. I held the lantern steady.
"And your scent." She wrinkled her nose. "Lye and fear. Very Luna of you." She turned, finally, to look at me directly, waiting for something — a flinch, a tremble, anything to feed on. I gave her nothing. My silence had cost me before. Tonight it seemed to cost her more.
Something in her face cracked open. "Do you think staying quiet makes you dignified?" Her voice climbed, sharp enough that one of the visiting Deltas glanced over. "You're staff. You're nothing. Say something."
I still didn't. That was the mistake, maybe, or maybe it was never going to matter what I did.
Her hand hit my chest before I saw it coming, and the fence was closer than I'd realized, close enough that when I stumbled back there was nothing behind me but silver thorns strung tight on wire. I felt the impact before I understood it — a hundred small mouths biting into both forearms at once, heat and ice at the same time, a smell like scorched hair rising off my own skin. I heard myself make a sound I didn't recognize.
Blood ran warm down both wrists, dripping off my fingers into the frost-hard grass. The burn didn't fade the way ordinary pain fades. It sank in, spreading under the skin like something looking for a way further in.
Arianna stepped back from the fence line, inspecting her own hands under the lantern light — unmarked, pale, perfect — and smiled like she'd proven something.
I heard Dylan before I saw him, boots crossing the clearing at a run, and for one useless half-second something old in my chest lifted, some seven-year reflex that still expected him to reach for me first.
He stepped over me.
His boot came down in the space beside my bleeding arm, close enough that I felt the cold air move, and he caught both of Arianna's hands in his, turning them under the light, checking her fingers, her palms, her wrists, his face tight with a fear he'd never once shown for me.
"Are you hurt? Did it touch you?" His voice cracked with real panic. "Show me."
He never looked down. Not once. Not at the blood soaking into the frozen ground beneath me, not at my arms, not at me.
The clearing had gone very still. I felt it rather than saw it — every visiting Alpha frozen mid-motion, cups lowered, conversations dying in throats. Sylvie was already moving, fast, cutting a straight line through the crowd toward me. And across the grass, the stranger in Court livery had stopped pretending to watch anything else at all.
