When My Ex-Husband Dragged Me Before the Lycan Council

The pack-token hit the floor three inches from my boot at 2:47 on a Thursday afternoon.

I didn't look down. I looked at Kingston's face instead — the same face I used to wake up to, the same mouth that spoke the rejection vow on the cliffs five years ago — and watched him smile like he'd just offered me mercy.

"Pick it up," he said. His voice carried that Alpha tone, the one that used to make my knees weak for entirely different reasons. Now it just sounded tired. "Ironhold needs servants. You'll have a roof. Meals. It's more than you deserve."

The trading post smelled like dust and old leather and the faint chemical tang of wolfsbane from the suppression collars hanging behind the counter. I'd come in for supplies — thread, dried meat, the kind of mundane shopping that kept my hands busy and my mind quiet. Isabela was holding my hand, her small fingers sticky from the candy I'd bought her two stores back.

Kiana stood beside Kingston, her arm looped through his in that performative way she had. She looked at me like I was something she'd scraped off her shoe five years ago and was mildly surprised to see still existing. Leif stood half-behind her, eleven years old now, taller than I remembered, staring at me with an expression I couldn't read.

I pressed two fingers to the left side of my collar. The wolfsbane lining burned, low and constant, the way it always did.

"Evelynn." Kingston's voice sharpened. "I said pick it up."

Isabela looked up at me, then at Kingston, then at the token on the floor. Her face scrunched in the way it did when she was trying to figure out why adults were being stupid.

I stepped forward. Kingston's smile widened.

I brought my boot down on the token. The metal bent, then cracked, the Ironhold crest splitting clean down the middle.

The smile died.

"You smell like rot," I said. My voice came out flat and precise, the way it always did when I needed it to. "Like something that's been decaying from the inside for a long time."

Kingston's hand shot out. He grabbed my wrist — not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make a point. His wolf was there, under his skin, straining toward something it couldn't name. I could feel the wrongness of it, the way a severed bond leaves a ghost-ache that never fully heals.

"You don't get to talk to me like that," he said. The Alpha tone was back, heavier this time, pushing down on my shoulders like a physical weight. "You're packless. Wolfless. You're nothing."

My wolf stirred.

It was faint — barely a flicker, the way a candle flame moves when you walk past it in a dark room — but it was there. For the first time in five years, something inside me that wasn't rage or grief or the chronic burn of wolfsbane moved on its own.

I looked at Kingston's hand on my wrist. Then I looked at his face.

"Let go," I said.

He didn't.

Isabela stepped between us.

She was four years old and came up to Kingston's hip, and she looked at him the way she looked at bugs she found interesting but not threatening. Her wolf was there too — I could feel it, the faint hum of a pup-wolf that had awakened far too early and didn't understand yet that size was supposed to matter.

"You're hurting my mama," Isabela said. Not scared. Just observing.

Kiana laughed. It was a sharp, brittle sound. "How sweet. The Omega has a pup."

Kingston's grip loosened. Not because of Isabela. Because something in the air had shifted, and his decaying wolf was pulling him in two directions at once — toward the ghost-scent it couldn't catch and away from the small wolf standing between us that radiated something his instincts recognized as dangerous.

I pulled my wrist free. Took Isabela's hand. Turned toward the door.

"Evelynn." Leif's voice, behind me. I hadn't heard him speak in five years. It sounded older than I expected. "Mom—"

I didn't turn around.

"I'm not your mother anymore," I said. "Kiana is. You made that choice on the cliffs."

I walked out. Isabela skipped beside me, humming something tuneless, completely unbothered. The door swung shut behind us, and I heard Kingston say something low and vicious that I didn't stay to parse.

The sunlight outside was too bright. My hand was shaking.

I pressed my fingers to the collar again. The burn was worse now, or maybe I was just noticing it more. Beneath it, my wolf was still moving — not waking, not yet, but registering something. Threat. Proximity. The shape of a thing I'd spent five years trying to bury.

Isabela looked up at me. "That man was mean."

"Yes," I said.

"Are we going home now?"

"Yes."

She nodded, satisfied, and went back to humming.

That night, after Isabela was asleep, I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the locked box I'd moved three times and never opened. My fingers hovered over the lid. I could feel the weight of what was inside without looking — the hand-carved bone pendant I'd made for Kingston on our first mating anniversary, the night he clasped the matching Luna pendant around Kiana's neck instead, in front of the entire pack, while I stood at the head table with my gift and my bond screaming.

I opened the box. Looked at the pendant. Put it back. Closed the lid.

My wolf stirred again. Faint. Uneasy.

I reached for the mind-link and called Thomas.

His response was immediate. *Evelynn?*

*They're here,* I said. *Kingston. Kiana. Leif. At the border trading post.*

Silence on the link. Then: *Did he touch you?*

*My wrist. Nothing else. Isabela stepped between us.*

Another silence, longer this time. I could feel the weight of what Thomas wasn't saying — the Lycan Prince aura he was holding back, the wolf that wanted to cross the distance between Silvercrest and here in a single night and rip Kingston's throat out in the street.

*I'm coming back early,* he said finally. *Tomorrow night. Don't go into the trading district alone again.*

*I won't.*

*Evelynn—*

*I'm fine,* I said. *We're fine.*

I closed the link before he could argue.

I sat in the silence and felt the wolfsbane collar burn and my wolf stir and the faint nausea rising in my throat that I couldn't decide was fear or poison or something older than either.

Outside, the moon was rising. I didn't look at it.