Three days after the banquet, Derek Holt marched me to the southern border with the rest of the Omega labor detail before dawn.
We were told it was a supply run. Field kits, water, extra bindings for the patrol. I carried a crate on my hip and kept my head down, my burned palm from the wolfsbane storage still stinging from yesterday's shift. My wolf paced under my ribs. She had not gone back to sleep since the clinic floor cracked.
Cody was already at the tree line when we arrived. So was Alyssa, in a coat cut wide at the waist to show what she wanted shown — the swell of a second pup, deliberately visible against the pale morning light. Two Crestfall observers stood behind Donovan's Beta, watching everything.
The rogues came out of the pines fifteen minutes later.
I saw it for what it was in the first thirty seconds. The attack angles were wrong. The rogues broke formation exactly where Ironmaw's warriors had cover. Derek was already moving before the first snarl broke, and Marcus's flank rotated with a precision that only came from rehearsal.
A staged skirmish. For the Crestfall wolves. For Alyssa.
I set the crate down and pressed my back against a tree trunk, palm flat against the bark. My wolf snarled at me to move — to run, to shift, to do anything but stand there — and I held her down with every count of breath I had left.
One of the rogues broke toward the observers' side, and Cody was there before the man's second stride. He didn't strike. He turned. He turned his back to the fight and put his body between the rogue and Alyssa, arms out, sheltering her stomach with his own chest in full view of every warrior in the clearing.
A cover. A declaration. Wordless and complete.
Every Ironmaw wolf who had ever bowed to me as Luna saw it.
The skirmish ended two minutes later. The rogues broke and ran. No one pursued them very hard.
Cody straightened. Kissed Alyssa's temple. Then his eyes found me across the clearing.
He walked to the nearest fire — one of the warming braziers the patrol kept lit at the border post — and drew a silver-cored blade from Derek's belt. He held the flat of it in the coals for a slow count, and I watched him do it, and I understood.
"Bring her forward," Cody said.
Derek's hand closed on my elbow. He did not drag me. He did not have to. I walked because walking was still mine.
Cody's warriors formed a loose half-circle. The Crestfall observers stayed exactly where they were. Alyssa watched from beside a lieutenant with her hand resting on her belly.
Cody rolled his right shoulder, slow.
"Kneel," he said.
I didn't kneel. Derek's hand pressed down on my shoulder, and my knees folded, but my eyes stayed on Cody's face.
"Ironmaw property," he said, loud enough for every wolf in the clearing, "is marked as Ironmaw property. This is pack law."
He pulled the blade from the coals. The silver glowed a dull orange along the edge, and the air around it shimmered.
He pressed it to my collarbone.
The pain was not pain. Pain was a word for something smaller. The silver cut through skin, through the layer of scent-signature that made me a wolf at all, and something inside my chest tore open on a frequency my body had never made a sound for. My mouth opened. No sound came out. My vision went white at the edges and then gold, a gold I had never seen, and I heard — very clearly, from somewhere deep beneath my ribs — a roar.
Not a stir. Not a whisper. A roar that cracked the air pressure around my head so hard that two of Cody's warriors flinched.
My hand moved before I decided.
I closed my palm around the flat of the blade.
The silver seared into my skin — the burn was immediate, deep, unspeakable — and I did not let go. I ripped the blade sideways out of Cody's grip. My other hand caught the hilt. And I drove it into his shoulder.
The silver went in three inches deep.
Cody did not shout. He did not stagger. He looked down at the blade in his shoulder, and then he looked at my face, and his expression was not pain. It was the face of a man watching a calculation come out wrong.
The clearing had gone absolutely silent. Not one warrior moved. Not one breath. Alyssa's hand had frozen halfway to her mouth.
Cody's eyes stayed on mine. My eyes, I knew, were gold — I could feel it in the way the light bent at the edges of my vision. He saw it. He saw all of it.
He did not pull the blade out. He waited. He wanted the pack to see him wait.
Then, with his own hand, slowly, he drew the silver from his shoulder. Blood ran down his arm and dripped onto the frost.
He said nothing.
He turned and walked to Alyssa and put his arm around her shoulders and walked her back toward the vehicles, and the silence he left in the clearing was worse than anything he had ever said out loud.
Derek's hand loosened on my shoulder. He did not meet my eyes.
---
The junior healer in the Omega medical station was a boy no older than nineteen. His hands shook when he wrapped my palm. He did not ask about the burn on my collarbone. He wrapped that too, and looked at the floor while he did it.
I sat on the exam table and watched the door.
Marcus Webb appeared in the frame ten minutes later.
He did not step inside. He did not speak. He stood in the doorway with his shoulders squared and his hands loose at his sides, and he looked at my bandaged palm, and then at the wrapped burn on my collarbone, and then, briefly, at my face.
His jaw worked once.
He set a clean folded cloth on the small table by the door. Not medical grade. A personal handkerchief, dark gray, pressed. He set it down carefully, the way you set down something you didn't want to disturb.
Then he turned and walked out.
The junior healer looked at the cloth. Looked at me. Said nothing.
I reached across with my unburned hand and picked it up. It was warm from Marcus's pocket. There was no note. There was no message. There was only the small, unspeakable fact that Cody's Beta had crossed a room to leave me something clean.
I folded it into my lap.
My wolf, awake now and impossible to put back, pressed her head against the inside of my ribs and settled — not calm, not still, but listening. Waiting.
So was I.
