After My Mate Killed Our Pup

Three days.

That was how long it took me to stop shaking every time I heard footsteps in the corridor. Not because the shaking stopped—the silver in my blood made sure of that—but because I taught myself to hold it inside my chest instead of letting it show in my hands.

The wheelchair squeaked on the servants' quarters floor. Someone had given me the oldest one they could find, one wheel wobbling, the leather cracked. Winifred's idea of humor, probably. I rolled myself to the narrow window and looked out at the pack house grounds I used to walk every morning, checking the wards, greeting the warriors on patrol. My hands remembered the shape of every stone in that path.

My hands remembered other things too.

Camera rotation, north corridor: forty seconds facing east, twenty seconds facing the stairwell, four seconds of blind arc as the mount reset. Lower corridor terminal: patrol pass at 2:47, next pass at 3:14. Twenty-seven minutes. My old Luna credentials had access to every terminal in this building, and Emmett had been so busy carving me out of his life he had forgotten to carve me out of the system.

People who think you're finished stop locking doors.

I closed my eyes and let the map settle behind them, clean and quiet, the way I used to arrange training rosters in my head. It wasn't hope. Hope was a thing I had already buried on a banquet hall floor. This was something colder and steadier. This was work.

—

Sophie found me before breakfast.

She swept into the great hall trailed by half a dozen mid-ranked wolves, my Luna pendant catching the light against her throat. She had learned to walk with it already, hip forward, chin high, the way I never had. I was in the doorway with a bucket at my feet, waiting for someone to tell me what an Omega was allowed to do next.

"There she is." Her voice was warm the way honey is warm—thick, sticky, everywhere at once. "Poor thing, sitting in the hallway like she doesn't know what to do with herself."

The wolves behind her tittered. One of them, a Delta named Cora who used to bring me tea during ward inspections, smiled at the floor.

Sophie crouched in front of my wheelchair. Not close enough to touch. Close enough to be seen crouching.

"The hall floor," she said, still warm, still smiling. "Every morning, before the pack rises. On your hands and knees, please. The Omega should keep herself useful."

She let the word Omega hang.

I looked at her pendant. The chain had been sized for my neck; it sat higher on hers, tight in the hollow of her collarbone. She saw me looking and touched it, deliberate, two fingers laid flat over the silver.

"Yes, Luna," I said.

My voice came out even. That surprised me a little. Sophie's smile tightened at the corners, just for a second—she had wanted a flinch, and I hadn't given her one. She rose and swept out of the hall, her wolves trailing after her like a hem.

I lowered myself out of the chair onto the stone. My knees hit the floor Emmett had spoken the rejection over. Same tile. Same crack where the wine had gone. I could still see the faint discoloration, three feet from my left hand, where they hadn't quite scrubbed the blood out.

I dipped the rag in the bucket and began.

Footsteps came down the corridor and stopped at the entrance. I didn't look up. I knew the weight of Reid Calloway's boots the way I knew every stone in the ward path. I heard him breathe in—once, sharp—and then his boots turned and walked away.

I kept scrubbing. The water in the bucket went pink.

—

At 2:51 in the morning, I rolled myself out of the servants' quarters with my hands wrapped in a strip of blanket to muffle the wheels.

The corridor was empty. The patrol had passed four minutes ago. I counted the camera arc in my head—forty east, twenty stairwell, four blind—and moved through the blind on the fourth count.

The terminal blinked awake under my fingers. My old credentials held. My hands shook, silver-shake, not fear-shake, and I flattened them on the desk until they stopped enough to type.

Medical wing. Night of the banquet. Camera three.

The file loaded.

I watched myself on the screen, sedated on the cot, my neck already bandaged. I watched Emmett walk in without hurrying. I watched Marcus's shoulders draw up around his ears.

"Directly into the mark site," Emmett said, from the speaker, in the same clipped voice I had heard through the fog. "Then the wolfsbane, twice daily. I want her wolf dormant. Permanently."

Unhurried. Clinical. Preserved.

I copied the file to the drive I had hidden inside a maintenance manual three shelves down in the utility closet—a manual so dusty the last signature on it was mine, from two years ago, when I still cared about maintaining the boilers. No one had opened it since.

I logged out. Wiped the terminal history. Rolled back through the blind on the four-count.

In the servants' quarters, I lay down on the cot and pressed two fingers to the cold place on my neck where my mark used to live. Nothing answered. My wolf was still under, still silent, still buried under whatever Marcus had put into me.

But somewhere far below all of that, in the dark, something had begun to keep score.

I slept.