They came for me at noon.

Two betas I had known for four years. One of them had brought me tea when I was on bed rest after the fourth loss. He would not look at me now. "The Alpha has called assembly," he said. "Great hall. Now."

I followed them down the stairs. My legs worked. My hands hung at my sides. I pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist and counted the pulse. One. Two. Three.

The great hall was full. Every senior wolf. Every ranked member. Rows of faces I knew. Omegas standing at the back. She-wolves I had sat with during their own grief. Betas whose children I had held. All of them looking at me or carefully not looking at me, which was somehow worse.

Walker stood at the center, behind the Alpha's table. Sylvia was to his left, half a step back, her face arranged into something soft and sad. Derek Holt stood at the far wall with a folder under his arm. His face told me nothing.

I stopped where they told me to stop. In the middle of the hall. Alone.

Walker did not wait. He lifted the papers — my cookbook papers, the ones Mara had found — and began to read. His voice carried. The Alpha tone. The one that made every wolf in the room go still without choosing to.

"Patrol route designations for the eastern perimeter. Border checkpoint schedules. Rogue contact protocols." He read each line. Each date. Each name. "Found in the personal effects of Eva Pierce. Prepared for external distribution."

I opened my mouth. He kept reading.

"By the authority vested in me as Alpha of Black Moon Pack, and in accordance with pack law regarding treason and betrayal of trust —"

I tried again. "Walker —"

"You are stripped of the title of Luna, effective immediately."

The room went silent. Not the kind of silence where people are waiting. The kind where they have already decided.

He set the papers down. He looked at me for the first time since I had entered the hall. "You are designated Omega. You will surrender all ceremonial privileges and access to ranked pack functions. You are confined to quarters pending investigation into further charges."

Four minutes. The whole thing took four minutes. I know because I counted my pulse the entire time. Two hundred and forty beats.

Somebody near the front — I did not see who — whispered something to the wolf beside them. A soft, pitying sound that was worse than anger.

I looked at the faces. At the she-wolves who used to ask me to bless their pups. At the healer who had worked beside me for three years. At Gamma Reese, who would not meet my eyes.

At the back of the hall, Derek was still standing with the folder. His gaze was on the papers on the Alpha's table. Not on Walker. Not on me. On the evidence. His jaw worked once, like he was biting down on something he did not want to say. Then he turned and walked out.

I pressed my thumb against my wrist so hard I thought the bone might crack.

Walker dismissed the assembly. People filed out. Some of them looked at me as they passed. Some of them looked at the floor. Sylvia touched Walker's arm and said something too low for me to hear. He nodded. She smiled, small and private, and followed the others out.

I stood there until the hall was empty. Then I went back to the room that smelled like dust.

That night, I could not sleep. I sat on the cot with Buster's collar in my hands. The leather was cracked and soft from years of wear. I had kept it after they took him to the kennels. I did not know why. Maybe because it was the only thing left in this house that had ever been glad to see me.

I wrapped it around my wrist twice and tied it.

Then I stood up and walked out of the room. Down the hall. Down the stairs. No one stopped me. The house was dark and still. I walked through the kitchen, out the side door, across the courtyard. My feet knew the way. I had walked this property for seven years.

The eastern tree line was two hundred meters from the pack house. I made it that far before the air changed.

It hit me like a fist. Not physical. Worse. The weight of an Alpha in full presence, rolling through the bond I had never wanted and could not sever. My knees buckled. I caught myself against a tree and forced myself upright.

Walker stepped out of the shadows. His eyes were already shifted. Slate grey. Glowing faint in the dark. His wolf was right there, just under his skin, and the power coming off him made my teeth ache.

"You're not leaving," he said.

I did not answer. I took one step forward.

He moved faster than I did. He was in front of me before I finished the step. Close enough that I could smell the earth and smoke scent of his wolf. Close enough that I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes.

"Eva." His voice dropped lower. Not the Alpha tone. Something worse. Something that pulled at the base of my spine where the false bond sat like a scar. "You don't get to run from this."

I looked at him. I looked at him the way I had looked at him seven years ago, when I thought the Moon Goddess had answered every silent prayer I'd ever whispered. When I thought he was mine.

"I'm not running," I said quietly. "I'm leaving."

His hand closed around my wrist. Not hard. He did not have to be hard. The bond did the rest.

"No," he said. "You're not."

And I knew, standing there in the dark with his hand on my wrist and his wolf in his eyes, that he meant it.

He did not drag me. That would have been a kindness, in its way. A clear thing. Something the body could name.

He walked me back. His hand stayed on my wrist the whole way, not tight, just there, the way a man holds a leash he does not need to pull. The bond did the pulling. My feet went where his went. My breath matched his without my asking. I hated my own body for knowing the rhythm.

The pack house was dark and quiet. He took me past the kitchen, past the back stair, to the door at the end of the corridor that led down. I had not been down there in years. I used to send omegas to fetch flour from the dry shelves. Now I was the one going.

The stairs were narrow. The air got colder with each step. He opened a heavy wooden door and stood back to let me go in first.

It was a storage room. Stone walls. A single high window the size of a dinner plate. Sacks of grain stacked against one wall. The smell of damp stone, and underneath it, the sweet old smell of feed.

I walked to the middle of the room. I did not turn around.

"In the morning," he said behind me, "the physician will come."

I waited.

"You still carry the bloodline." His voice was the voice he used to brief his deltas on patrol routes. Even. Efficient. "The treatments are aggressive, but they have a success rate. We will try until it takes. Sylvia will raise the pup."

I closed my eyes.

I did not turn around. I did not want to give him my face.

"Walker." My voice was very small. I hated that. I tried again. "Do you feel anything."

There was a pause. Not the pause of a man thinking. The pause of a man choosing which sentence to use.

"That isn't the relevant question."

I heard the door close. I heard the lock turn. I heard his boots on the stairs going up, and I heard them stop once, near the top, and then keep going.

Then I was alone.

I sat down against the wall. The stone was cold through my shirt. I drew my knees up and rested my arms across them. Buster's collar was still tied around my wrist. I pressed my thumb against the leather and felt the cracks in it.

I did not cry. I had thought I might. There had been a moment, on the stairs, when I felt the tears coming up and I had braced for them. But they did not come. Something underneath them had already moved.

I let myself sit with it. All of it. I had been refusing to, for seven years. Tonight I was not going anywhere.

The first one. I had not even known what I was losing yet. I had been twenty-three. I remembered the bathroom tile. The way the cold went up through my knees. Walker had been at a council meeting. Someone had brought me tea.

The second. The bed-rest months. The blue chair by the window. He came home for dinner three times that whole stretch.

The third. The one I had almost named. The lock of fur, soft and grey. The cedar box. The boot.

The fourth. The fifth. I let them come. Each one. The empty bed afterwards. The meals I ate standing up in the kitchen because sitting down at the long table alone was worse. The seven Christmases. The seven birthdays. The mornings I had woken up and reached, before I remembered not to.

Sable rose inside me. She did not howl. She did not pace. She lay down beside me the way a dog does when someone is sick, and she stayed.

You knew, she said again, without saying it.

I knew.

The moon moved across the high window. A slow pale square sliding along the opposite wall. I watched it.

Something in me settled. Not peace. Not even calm. Something harder than that. A kind of quiet that had bone in it.

By the time the square of moonlight had crossed the wall and started to fade, I was not broken. I want to be clear about that. I was decided.

I did not yet know how. I only knew that the woman who had walked down those stairs was not the woman who would walk back up them. Whatever came next — the physician, the needles, the years they meant to take from my body — they would not get the rest of me. They had taken what they were going to take. The remainder was mine.

I must have slept. Just for a little.

I woke to a sound I did not recognize.

A low groaning, far off. Like a tree bending in heavy wind. Except there was no wind. The sound came from underneath. From the stone.

Then I felt it. Cold. Wet. Curling around my ankle.

I looked down.

Water. Pushing in fast under the door, spreading across the floor in a thin dark sheet. I scrambled up. The sheet became a puddle became a flood. I heard it now — a roaring outside, somewhere above, a sound like the sky breaking open.

Footsteps overhead. Many. Running. Voices shouting orders I could not make out through the stone.

And then, clear as if he were beside me, Walker's voice — the Alpha tone, sharpened, commanding — somewhere above and far to the east. Evacuating. Coordinating. Calling Sylvia's name.

The water reached my knees.

I heard him give one order I could not pretend not to understand.

"Hold the basement locked. She runs the moment she has the chance."

The water kept rising.