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

Rhea didn't speak when I walked in.

She just looked at my shoulder — at the gauze, at the faint violet stain bleeding through it — and her face did something complicated that she quickly put away. She gestured to the examination table without a word.

I sat. She worked.

Her hands were steady at first. She peeled the gauze back slowly, and I heard the small sound she made in her throat when she saw it. Not a gasp. Something quieter. The kind of sound you make when you already suspected the worst and the worst turns out to be worse than that.

The word was still angry. Red at the edges, the skin raised and wrong. Underneath it, where the wolfsbane ink had driven down through the layers, I could feel Sable — distant, muffled, like she was calling to me from the bottom of a well.

Rhea cleaned it without speaking. Her hands started to tremble on the third pass.

"This isn't a surface wound," she said finally. Her voice was careful. Too careful. "The ink has penetrated into the subcutaneous layer. With your bloodline sensitivity—" She stopped. Started again. "Mila. This isn't a humiliation. This is—"

"I know what it is."

She looked up at me.

"I'm going to report this to Cassian," she said. "He needs to understand what wolfsbane-laced ink does to a she-wolf with your sensitivity. He needs to—"

"He already knows."

The words landed flat in the small room. Rhea's hands went still over my shoulder.

I watched her process it. Watched her try to find a version of what I'd just said that meant something different. She couldn't.

Neither of us spoke for a long moment. The healer's chamber smelled like dried herbs and antiseptic and something faintly sweet that I had always found calming. It didn't calm me now. It just smelled like a room I was sitting in.

Rhea finished bandaging my shoulder in silence. When she tied off the last strip of gauze, she kept her hands there for just a second — not quite a hold, not quite nothing.

I got up and left before either of us had to figure out what to say.

---

Helena came the next morning.

I heard her knock — three soft taps, the kind that asked permission — and I already knew who it was before I opened the door. She was dressed in pale blue. Soft colors, always. Colors that said I mean no harm before she opened her mouth.

"I had to come," she said. Her eyes were wet. Not crying, just wet, hovering at the edge of it in a way that was somehow more effective than actual tears. "When I heard what happened — Mila, I want you to know I had nothing to do with it. Nothing. I am horrified."

I stepped back from the door. Not an invitation, exactly. Just a removal of the obstacle.

She came in. She sat in the chair by the window without being asked, which she always did, and folded her hands in her lap and looked at me with that expression she had — the one that said I am trying so hard to reach you.

"I only want peace between us," she said. "I've always only wanted that. Whatever you think of me, I need you to know that."

I sat on the edge of the bed. I looked at her. I said nothing.

She talked for a few more minutes. The words were well-constructed — remorse without admission, sympathy without specifics, the kind of apology that couldn't be held to anything because it never actually claimed anything. I had heard variations of it before. I let it run its course.

When she stood to leave, she paused.

It was a small pause. Natural-looking. The kind that seemed like she'd just noticed something on her way to the door.

The wolf totems were on the windowsill. Seven of them, carved from different woods — cedar, oak, birch — each one a different size, each one something I had made with my own hands over the years. The smallest one I had carved the winter after the street race, when I couldn't sleep and needed something to do with my hands that wasn't falling apart.

Helena picked it up.

She turned it over slowly, her thumb running along the grain. Her face was turned slightly away from me, but I could see the corner of her mouth. Just the corner.

She was smiling.

Not the performed smile. Not the trembling, effortful smile she wore for Cassian and the council. This one was small and private and satisfied, the smile of someone handling something that used to belong to someone else.

She set it back down. Carefully. Almost gently.

"These are beautiful," she said, turning back to me with the other smile back in place. "You're so talented, Mila."

She left.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the totem she had touched. I didn't move it. I didn't pick it up. I just looked at it for a long time, and I thought about the smile I wasn't supposed to have seen.

She hadn't bothered to hide it because she didn't think I was watching closely enough.

That was her mistake. I had been watching her for months. I had been watching everyone.

I pressed my fingers once over the bandage on my shoulder — not hard, just a touch — and I thought: eight more days.

---

The regional summit was held in Ironveil's great hall, the one I had redesigned two years ago to project exactly the right kind of dominance to visiting pack leaders. Long table, high ceilings, the pack's territorial maps framed along the north wall. My maps. My borders. My work, wearing Ironveil's name.

I sat three seats down from Cassian. Helena sat at his left. The visiting Alphas filled the rest of the table — six packs, their Betas and Gammas ranged behind them. Everyone in their best. Everyone performing strength.

The summit had been running for two hours when it happened.

Helena reached for her wine. Her hand caught the glass wrong — or seemed to — and it tipped, splashing across the front of her dress. The wine was pale gold. The stain spread fast.

She gasped.

Not a small gasp. A full-body recoil, her chair scraping back, her hand flying to her throat. Her face went white in a way that looked very convincing.

"Wolfsbane," she choked out. "There's wolfsbane in the—"

She looked at me.

The whole table looked at me.

"She's been doing it for weeks." Her voice broke on cue. "The food, the wine — I didn't want to say anything, I didn't want to cause trouble, but I can't—" A sob. "She's jealous. About the ring. She's been trying to—"

"Cassian." I kept my voice level. "The wine came from the same decanter everyone at this table has been drinking from for the last two hours. Ask anyone."

He wasn't looking at the decanter. He was looking at Helena, who had her hand pressed to her chest and was shaking in a way that was genuinely impressive.

"Garret." His voice was flat. "Take her to her chambers. Keep her there."

I looked at him. I waited for the question that didn't come — the one question, just one, that would have taken thirty seconds to answer.

It didn't come.

Two warriors appeared at my shoulders. I felt their hands close on my arms, and I thought, very clearly: this is what it looks like. This is what it has always been.

I walked out of my own summit hall between two of my own pack's warriors, past six visiting Alphas who watched in silence, past the maps on the wall that I had drawn, past the table I had chosen, through the doors I had stood in front of the day I became Luna of Ironveil.

Behind me, I heard Helena's breathing slow back to normal.

Seven days.