After My Mate Declared Me Dead

They let me out of the storage room on the fourth day.

No one told me I was free. The lock just clicked open sometime before dawn, and I sat there for a long time before I believed it enough to stand.

The pack house was quiet at that hour. I moved through it like something that had already died and simply hadn't been informed. A ghost in a green dress that was stiff now, dark at the hem. I did not look at anyone. No one looked at me.

Nathan was not in our room. His side of the bed was untouched — had been, I suspected, for longer than four days. I sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at the wall and felt the particular flatness of a person whose body has finished grieving before her mind caught up.

I had named her. In the dark of that room, alone on the concrete, I had named her. I hadn't told anyone. There was no one to tell.

The healer had been the only one who came close.

Not directly — Nathan's order had been specific, the kind of order no ranked wolf in this pack would risk defying openly. But on the second night, I had woken to a thin strip of light under the door and the quiet sound of something being pushed through the gap. Pain medication in a folded cloth. A clean compress. No note. Just that.

I had pressed my forehead against the cold floor and cried in a way I hadn't let myself cry before. Not for the pain. For the fact that someone had noticed I was in it.

That small thing kept me alive. I think about that sometimes.

---

I found the wood by accident.

There was a broken packing crate in the corner of the storage room, old and half-collapsed, and on the third day I started pulling it apart just to have something to do with my hands. One of the slats had a long clean grain. I had a splinter from the door frame that I'd been using to scratch marks into the wall — counting hours, then stopping, because counting made it worse.

I don't know when I started carving. I just looked down at some point and there was a wolf taking shape in the wood.

Small. Rough. The ears weren't quite even. I worked at it for most of that last night, and by morning it was finished, or as finished as it was going to be. I held it in my palm and looked at it for a long time.

I didn't have a name for what I was doing. I just knew I couldn't leave it in that room.

---

The willow tree at the edge of Ironveil territory was one I had always loved. It sat just where the land began to slope toward the frozen river, its branches hanging down in long pale curtains. I had walked past it a hundred times on patrol. I had never stopped.

The ground was iron-hard. I dug with my hands and a sharp stone until I had a hollow deep enough, and I set the little wolf inside it, and I covered it over.

I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say to the Moon Goddess anymore.

I knelt there until the cold worked its way through my knees and up into my chest and I couldn't feel my fingers. Then I got up and walked back.

I did not look behind me.

---

The healer found me three nights later.

Not in the pack house. In the narrow corridor behind the medical wing, which was the one place in the building where the surveillance was thin — I had learned that on my overnight patrols, all those months of being sent out into the dark while Nathan—

I stopped that thought.

The healer was already there when I turned the corner. Small, careful, hands folded. Eyes that had been carrying something heavy for a long time.

"There is a man," the healer said, very quietly. "He's been asking about you. Carefully. Through channels that don't touch this pack's network." A pause. "I think you should meet him."

I looked at the healer for a long moment. "Who is he?"

"A Lycan Prince. He presented himself as a cross-pack medical liaison. But he asked for you specifically." Another pause, smaller. "He knew your scent description."

Something moved in me that I didn't have a name for yet.

"When?" I said.

---

The neutral location was a roadside medical outpost two territories over, the kind of anonymous, fluorescent-lit space that existed specifically to belong to no one.

He was already there when I arrived. Tall — genuinely tall, the kind that changes the proportions of a room. Dark coat. He was looking at a wall of medical supply charts when I came through the door, and he turned, and something in his face went very still.

Just for a second. Then it was controlled again, smooth, like a door closing quietly.

He smelled of dark honey and woodsmoke.

I didn't know why that made me feel, for the first time in weeks, like I was standing on solid ground.

"Saoirse." His voice was low. Even. The voice of a man who had rehearsed staying calm. "My name is Elijah Knight. I need you to hear what I'm about to tell you, and I need you to know that every part of it is your choice."

He laid it out in precise, quiet detail. The cliff bridge. The frozen river. The body Nathan would be summoned to identify.

He did not dress it up. He did not promise me it would be painless.

When he finished, I looked at him across that small, fluorescent room, and I thought about the concrete floor, and the wooden wolf in the frozen earth, and the name I had given her that no one else would ever know.

"Yes," I said.

He held my gaze for one long moment. Something moved behind his eyes — relief, I thought, and something older and quieter than relief.

Then he nodded, and we began.