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

The pack house was quiet by midnight.

Not the comfortable quiet of a place at rest — the held-breath quiet of a place that had forgotten how to exhale. I sat at the small table by the window with the birch block in my hands and the carving blade catching the candlelight, and I worked slowly, more slowly than I usually did, because I was not trying to finish quickly. I was trying to finish right.

The wolf that came out of the wood was small. Smaller than the others had been. Rougher, too — I left the haunches unsmoothed, left a slight irregularity in the line of the spine, because something in me did not want this one to be perfect. Perfect things get taken. Rough things get left behind.

Sable was awake inside me. Not restless. Just present, the way she had been these last few days — close to the surface, breathing steadily, watching through my eyes with a patience that felt almost ceremonial.

I turned the totem over and set the blade to the base.

The old Lycan script was something Sloan had taught me in my second year of corps training, during the long winter sessions when the outdoor drills were cancelled and he would sit across from me at a narrow table and make me copy characters until my hand cramped. I had not used it in years. But the shapes came back the way old things do — not from memory exactly, but from somewhere deeper, from the part of you that learned something so thoroughly it stopped being knowledge and became reflex.

I carved her name into the base. Four characters. Clean and small.

Sable.

I set the blade down. I held the totem in both hands for a moment, feeling the weight of it — lighter than it looked, the way birch always is — and then I stood and carried it to the windowsill.

I set it facing the forest.

Not facing the pack house. Not facing the great hall or the Alpha's study or the training yard or any of the things I had spent nine years building inside these borders. Facing the tree line, the dark edge of the woods, the direction of the north corridor and the third panel left of the boiler room and forty-two steps to somewhere else.

I looked at it for a long moment. The candle behind me threw my shadow forward across the sill, and for a second the totem sat inside my shadow, and then I stepped aside and the moonlight found it instead.

I went to bed.

I did not sleep for a long time, but I lay still, and I ran the extraction route through my mind one final time. North corridor. Third panel, left of the boiler room — the panel with the slight warp at the bottom left corner, the one that looked like settling but wasn't. Forty-two steps to the drainage junction. The team would be in position by the time the banquet reached its second hour. I had a window of eleven minutes from the moment I entered the tunnel to the moment the corridor above would be swept.

Eleven minutes was enough. I had done more with less.

I closed my eyes. I thought about the totem on the windowsill, facing the forest. I thought about the woman who had carved it, and the woman who would walk out of the tunnel on the other side, and the distance between them.

I let myself feel it. All of it, cleanly, the way I had promised myself I would.

Then I let it go.

---

Rhea came to find me at breakfast.

She didn't sit down. She stood at the edge of the dining room doorway with a folder tucked under her arm and her healer's composure doing the work it always did — holding her face in place while something behind it moved fast.

"I'm going to see him this morning," she said quietly. "Before the preparations start. I have the full report — bloodline sensitivity, toxicity thresholds, the whole documentation." She paused. "I wanted you to know."

I looked at her. I thought about what I knew and what she didn't, about the eleven minutes and the tunnel and the team already in position somewhere beyond the tree line.

"Rhea," I said.

"It needs to be on record." Her voice was steady but her hands weren't — I could see the slight tension in the fingers holding the folder, the knuckles a shade too pale. "Whatever happens tonight, it needs to be on record that he knew. That someone told him."

I understood what she was doing. She was building a paper trail for a fire she could feel coming but couldn't name. She was doing the only thing she knew how to do, which was document the truth and put it in front of the person who needed to see it and hope that this time, this time, it would land.

I did not tell her it wouldn't reach him.

"Thank you," I said instead. And I meant it — not for the outcome, which I already knew, but for the fact of it. For the fact that she had tried.

She nodded once, pressed the folder tighter under her arm, and left.

I watched her go. I thought about Garret's office, which sat between the dining room and Cassian's study like a checkpoint. I thought about the way Garret moved through this pack house — efficient, loyal, completely without doubt — and I thought about the folder, and the report inside it, and the distance it would not travel.

I finished my coffee. I set the cup down carefully.

Seven hours.

---

I was with the ceremony coordinator for most of the afternoon — final walkthrough of the banquet seating, the territorial display arrangements, the order of the formal acknowledgments. The coordinator was a nervous Omega named Petra who had been running Ironveil's ceremonial calendar for six years and who spoke to me with the careful deference of someone who had watched my rank erode and was not sure how much deference was still appropriate.

I was patient with her. I answered her questions. I approved the seating chart and suggested a minor adjustment to the display arrangement that would better frame the pack's territorial maps — my maps — for the visiting Alphas.

When I returned to my dressing chamber, I knew before I touched the door.

The air was wrong. Too still. The faint, chemical edge of something beneath the cedar and the candle wax — barely there, the kind of thing you would miss if you weren't already looking for it.

I pushed the door open.

The room looked undisturbed. That was the first thing — how careful it was, how deliberate the normalcy. The gown hook was empty, but I had expected that. The mirror was clean. The chair was straight.

I crossed to the vanity. The cosmetics case sat on the left side, the way I always left it.

Except it was two inches too far right.

I stood very still. I looked at the case. I looked at the compact on top, its lid not quite flush — a gap at the hinge side, small enough to miss, not small enough for me.

I opened the compact.

The powder inside was wrong. The color was close — close enough to pass a quick glance — but the texture was off, too fine, and beneath the faint floral scent of the original there was something else. Something that made Sable go absolutely rigid inside me, her whole body locking up the way a wolf does when it scents a predator.

Wolfsbane.

I closed the compact. I set it back down, exactly as I had found it, two inches too far right, lid not quite flush.

I straightened up. I looked at my reflection in the mirror — at the woman standing in a dressing chamber that had been entered and arranged and left as a trap, wearing a borrowed gown because her own had been stolen, with a brand on her shoulder that said Defective and a bond around her chest that had been starving for two years.

I looked at her for a long moment.

Then I looked at the door. At the north corridor beyond it. At the third panel left of the boiler room and forty-two steps and eleven minutes and everything waiting on the other side.

One hour.

I began to dress.