After He Let Her Wear My Luna Gown, I Planned My Escape

Three weeks before the Harvest Moon Banquet, I walked past Cassian's study and heard her crying.

I knew that cry. Helena had been perfecting it for months. Soft, a little broken, the kind of sound that made strong men forget their own names. I stopped in the hallway, one hand on the wall. The door was open just a crack. I could see the edge of Dorian's framed photograph in her lap.

"She doesn't even look at me, Cass," Helena whispered. "At dinner last week, she walked past me like I was furniture. In front of Garret. In front of the council." A small hiccup. "I just... I have nothing left of him but this house. And she makes me feel like I shouldn't be in it."

I waited for Cassian to ask. To say, let me hear Mila's side. To say anything at all.

His voice came out tight. "I'll handle it."

That was when my wolf, Sable, made a sound inside me. Not a growl. Something quieter. Something tired.

I walked away before they heard me.

He summoned me that same night.

The office was lit by one lamp, the way he liked it when he was about to be unpleasant. Cassian stood behind his desk in a black shirt rolled to the elbows, jaw working. My fated mate. The Alpha of Ironveil. The man whose scent had once knocked me sideways when I was twenty-two and stupid and certain that the Moon Goddess didn't make mistakes.

He didn't ask me to sit.

"You will show more respect to Helena," he said. "In front of the pack. Starting tomorrow."

I stood very still. I had learned, by then, that stillness cost me less than anything else.

"What did I do?"

He blinked. Just once. "Excuse me?"

"What specific thing," I said, keeping my voice even, "did I do to her. Tell me, and I won't do it again."

His mouth opened. Closed. He couldn't name one. I watched him search for one and come up empty, and I watched him get angry that I had made him search.

He used his Alpha tone then. It hit my chest like a hand pressing down. "You will show. More. Respect."

I nodded. I did not speak. I left.

In the hallway, I waited for Sable to snarl, the way she always did after he used that tone on me. She didn't. She had curled up somewhere deep inside me and gone quiet, and for the first time in weeks I could not feel her breathing.

That was the night I started counting days.

Two weeks before the banquet, he called the council.

I sat at the long oak table I had picked out myself, three years ago, when this room was still ours. Garret on Cassian's right, the senior warriors down the sides, Rhea the healer at the far end with her hands folded. Helena seated to Cassian's left, in the chair that used to be mine. She wore gray. She always wore gray now. Mourning never seemed to end for her.

Cassian read from a prepared statement.

"In honor of my brother Dorian's memory, and to secure the standing of his widow within Ironveil, all proprietary defense strategies currently registered to Luna Mila will be transferred, effective immediately, to Helena."

The paper rustled. No one looked at me.

Those strategies were eight years of my life. The border rotation that broke the Crestwood incursion. The scent-decoy lattice that turned our western flank into a maze rogues couldn't read. The bonding protocols I built from my own bloodline gift, the kind no other she-wolf in the country could have built, because no other she-wolf had what ran in my blood.

"All in favor," Garret said.

Hands went up around the table. Even Rhea's, after a half-second pause where her eyes flicked to mine and away.

I watched my life's work sign itself over to a woman who couldn't read a topographical map.

I did not say a word.

That night I went to the back study, pulled the loose floorboard, and took out every notebook I had. The hand-drawn diagrams. The calculations only my bloodline could activate. I burned them in the iron fireplace, one page at a time, and watched the ink curl black.

Let her have the names. The bones of it. Without me, the strategies were a body without a heart. They would never run again.

The next night, I opened the encrypted channel I had kept dormant for nine years.

I typed three words. I need out.

Sloan answered in under an hour. He was the commander who had trained me before I left the corps for Cassian. He did not ask why. He did not ask if I was sure. He sent a plan, fully built, dates locked, contingencies stacked three deep. Extraction on the night of the Harvest Moon Banquet.

I read it twice. I closed the channel. I sat in the dark with my hand pressed flat over the brand that wasn't there yet, but would be soon.

Four days later, at the formal pack dinner, Helena poured my wine herself.

"Let me," she said, smiling at Cassian. "It's the least I can do."

I drank it because refusing would have been the kind of dismissive that made her cry into her napkin. The room tilted on the third sip. By the fifth, I couldn't feel my hands.

I woke up underground.

Damp concrete under my cheek. Wrists tied behind my back. The smell of wolfsbane already in my throat, sharp and green and wrong. A man I had never seen before crouched over my shoulder with a tattoo gun, and the ink in the well was a color no ink should be — that pale poisoned violet I knew from the healer's chamber.

"Hold still, Luna," he said, almost kind. "It'll scar cleaner."

The word he burned into me was DEFECTIVE.

The needle drove the wolfsbane down through my skin into the place where Sable lived. She screamed. I felt her scream through every bone in my body, and I bit through my own lip not to scream with her.

When they cut the rope and pushed me up the stairs, I walked back to the pack house under my own power. I will give myself that, always. I walked.

Cassian was in the foyer. He turned when I came in, blood drying on my collar, the wound still smoking faintly through the gauze the rogue had slapped on as an afterthought.

I pulled the gauze down. I let him see it.

He looked at the word on my shoulder. He looked at my face. And his jaw set in that way I used to think meant he was about to protect me.

"You needed to be put in your place," he said. "You've been arrogant with her. This is what arrogance costs."

I stood in the foyer of the house I had built, with poison eating through my wolf, and I waited to feel something break.

Nothing did. There was nothing left to break.

The last small light I had been carrying for him, the one I hadn't admitted I was still carrying, just went out. Quiet. Like a candle in a closed room.

I nodded once. I walked past him to the stairs.

Two and a half weeks until the banquet.

I could last that long.