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

I knew before I opened the door.

Something in the air was wrong — too still, the way a room goes quiet after something violent has happened inside it. I put my hand on the dressing chamber door and stood there for one breath, two, and then I pushed it open.

The gown was gone.

The hanger swayed on the hook, empty, the velvet padding I had wrapped around it still holding the ghost of the fabric's weight. The lock I had set the night before had been picked clean — no scratches, no forced entry. Someone who knew what they were doing. Someone who had done it before.

I stepped inside.

The totems were on the floor.

All of them. Every one. The cedar wolf and the oak one and the small birch piece I had finished three days ago — shattered, not knocked over, shattered, the way you shatter something deliberately, with your heel or the flat of your hand, making sure the pieces are small enough that they can't be put back together. The fragments were scattered across the stone floor in a wide arc, like someone had swept them off the sill in a single motion and kept walking.

I stood in the doorway and looked at them for a long time.

Sable was very quiet inside me. Not absent. Just still, the way she went still when the thing happening was too large for sound.

I went to my knees on the cold floor. I did not cry. I picked up the pieces one by one — the cedar wolf's head, the oak wolf's haunches, the birch wolf's legs, still mid-stride, still moving toward something — and I laid them in the cloth I pulled from the shelf above me. My hands were steady. I made them steady. I wrapped the cloth around the fragments and tied it at the corners and I stood up.

I carried them to the forest edge.

The oak tree was still there, at the boundary line Cassian and I had marked in the first year of our bond — a deep cut in the bark, our initials, the kind of thing you do when you are young and certain and have not yet learned what certainty costs. The cut had healed over mostly, the bark grown thick around it, but you could still see the shape of it if you knew where to look.

I dug with my hands. The soil was soft from last week's rain. I made the hole deep enough, laid the cloth bundle inside, and covered it over. I pressed my palm flat against the earth for a moment.

Then I stood up, brushed the dirt from my hands, and walked back to the pack house.

One day.

---

I found Cassian in the study.

He was at his desk, papers spread in front of him, a coffee going cold at his elbow. He looked up when I came in, and his expression did the thing it always did now — a brief, almost imperceptible bracing, like a man who has learned to expect a storm and has decided in advance not to move for it.

"The ceremonial gown is gone," I said. "The dressing chamber was entered last night. My totems were destroyed."

He set down his pen. He looked at me with that flat, patient attention — the kind that had nothing behind it.

"I'll look into it," he said.

"I'd like it back before tonight."

A pause. "It was likely a misunderstanding. Helena may have borrowed it for the banquet. She mentioned needing something appropriate and I—" He stopped. Seemed to hear himself. "You can wear something else. You have other gowns."

I looked at him.

I looked at the man sitting behind the desk of the pack house I had helped build, in the territory I had helped defend, behind borders I had drawn with my own hands. I looked at the mate mark on his neck, pale now, barely there. I looked at his hands on the desk, perfectly still, perfectly certain.

"She borrowed it," I said.

"Mila—"

"She borrowed it." I said it again, not as a question. Just to hear how it sounded in the room. Just to make sure we both understood what was being said.

He held my gaze. He did not flinch. He did not look away. He simply waited for me to accept it, the way he always waited, with the absolute patience of a man who had never once had to wonder whether the room would eventually come around to his position.

I nodded once.

I turned and walked out.

I did not look back. There was nothing behind me worth looking at.

---

The rehearsal was held in the great hall at dusk.

Helena came in wearing my gown.

The deep green fabric moved the way I had cut it to move — fluid at the hem, structured at the shoulders, the silver thread catching the hall's low light exactly as I had intended. The bloodline crest at the collar was invisible from a distance. She wouldn't have known it was there. She was wearing my work and she didn't even know the full weight of what she had put on.

The pack read Cassian's silence the way packs always do — as permission, as direction, as the shape of what was expected. Garret materialized at Helena's side within minutes, his posture deferential, his attention on her in the way a Beta's attention belongs to a Luna. The visiting warriors from the allied packs watched. The Omegas watched. Everyone arranged themselves around the new center of gravity without being told.

I stood near the back of the hall in a borrowed gown — dark blue, someone else's cut, someone else's hem. It fit well enough. It was not mine.

I watched Helena move through the room. She was gracious. She was warm. She touched arms and remembered names and laughed at the right moments, and she wore my gown like she had always owned it, like it had been made for her body and her life and her future.

Across the hall, Rhea appeared in the doorway.

She found me immediately — her eyes moved through the crowd with the practiced efficiency of a healer scanning for damage, and when they landed on me they stayed. Her face was careful. Controlled. But I knew Rhea's face. I had sat on her examination table and watched her try to hold herself together, and I knew what careful looked like on her when it was costing her something.

She looked at the gown Helena was wearing. She looked back at me.

I gave the smallest shake of my head.

Not yet.

She held my gaze for a moment longer. Then she looked away, and I looked away, and the rehearsal continued around us, and Helena laughed at something Garret said, and the silver thread at the collar of my gown caught the light one more time.

One night.

Just one more night.