After His Mistress Killed Our Unborn Pup

Caden called again two nights later, while I was pressing the last corner piece of blue sky into place and Wilder was watching me do it instead of the puzzle.

I took the phone into the hallway again. It was becoming a habit, this leaving of warm rooms to stand in cold ones and listen to Nighthollow unravel from two hundred miles away. I pressed my back to the wall and looked at the dark window at the end of the hall, the same mountains, the same stars, and waited.

"Seraphine did the verification this morning," Caden said. No greeting. He'd stopped doing that after the first call. "Full pack witness. Me, the Gamma, six seniors. Mallory stood in the center of the room like she was posing for something."

"And?"

"No conception scent. No gestational markers." A pause, like he was making sure I heard the shape of it. "There's no pup, Emberly. There never was."

I didn't feel triumph. I catalogued the fact the way I catalogued everything now—filed it, dated it, moved on. "Did she cry?"

"She screamed. Called Seraphine incompetent. Called the whole room blind." His voice went flatter. "Ledger didn't say a word. He just watched her the way you watch something you're trying to identify from a distance."

I closed my eyes and pictured it anyway, even though I told myself I wouldn't. The old kitchen. The old faces. A room I used to know the temperature of.

"There's more," Caden said, and something in his tone made me open my eyes again. "While the testing materials were still on the table, Seraphine went to her cabinet. Pulled a sealed file. Set it in front of Ledger without saying anything."

I knew, before he said it, what file that was.

"She kept it," I said. "I asked her not to report it."

"She kept it anyway. Flagged 'unexplained wolfsbane exposure.' Dated the week of the miscarriage." Caden exhaled, long and slow, like the words cost him something to carry. "Ledger read it standing up. I watched his hands. He didn't move for almost a full minute."

I pressed my fingers to the cold place on my neck, an old habit that hadn't caught up yet to the fact that there was nothing left there to press against.

"He asked me to pull the kitchen archive," Caden went on. "Security footage, the week the file was dated. I found it. Timestamped. Intact."

I already knew what it would show. I had known, somewhere underneath the parts of me that still functioned, for months. I had just never let myself look directly at it, the way you don't look directly at the sun even when you already know it's there.

"9:14 p.m.," Caden said. "Mallory. Alone in the Luna kitchen. She's got a little cloth pouch, and she opens it, and she crushes something dried between two spoons. Wolfsbane. You can see the color of it in the footage—that gray-green." His voice was careful now, deliberately even, the way you speak when you're trying not to let your own hands shake through your voice. "She stirs it into the teapot. Your teapot, Emberly. The one you used every night."

I thought about the tea. Ginger and something floral underneath, the way it had tasted slightly bitter that month and I'd blamed a bad batch of leaves.

"Her face," Caden said. "That's the part I can't— She's not rushed. She's not scared of getting caught. She's just stirring. Like she's making tea for herself. Ninety-four seconds of footage and her expression doesn't change once."

I didn't say anything. There was nothing in me reaching for the place where rage should have been. Just a long, quiet stretch of nothing, like standing at the edge of a lake and looking down into water too dark to see the bottom of.

"He played it for Ledger in full," Caden said. "Twice. I stood there both times. Neither of us said a word when it ended."

The hallway was very quiet. I could hear Wilder in the library, the soft scrape of a puzzle piece against the table, patient, waiting for me the way he always did.

"Emberly." Caden's voice dropped, tight and low, like he was already moving. "He just stood up. He told the Gamma to bring her in front of the whole pack. Tonight. He's already walking. I have to go."

The line went dead before I could ask him anything else, the silence on the other end swallowing whatever was about to happen two hundred miles away, without me, in a room I used to call mine.