My Alpha Husband Poisoned Our Son for His New Luna

I sent the message through Thornfield's relay just after sunrise, tapping it out on the burner phone Sera had pressed into my hand before I left her house. Wolfsbane. Diluted. Hidden behind the biscuit tin. Photos attached. I kept it short. Border relays weren't as secure as mind-links, and I didn't trust anything longer than facts.

Her reply came within the hour.

*Got it. This is enough to move on, but not enough to bury him. I need two more days on the transfer volumes—dates, headcounts, the border crossings. If we go to Council with half a case, they'll pick it apart and Philip walks. Don't touch Camille. Don't touch anyone. Let them think you're still just folding napkins.*

I read it twice, then deleted it the way she'd taught me.

Two more days. My whole body wanted to argue with that math, wanted to walk into the dining hall and put the jar on the table in front of Gerald and Marilyn and let them see it. But Sera had never once been wrong about what a pack would forgive itself for, and I understood, in the cold part of my mind that had learned to wait, that half a truth was worse than no truth at all.

I sat on the edge of the guest bed and opened my notebook to the log I'd started keeping when Peyton was two, back when it was only sleep charts and teething and how many ounces of milk. I turned to the newest pages and began cross-referencing. The grey undertone in his skin—that started nineteen days ago, the same week Camille began bringing him the gummies himself instead of leaving them with the nursery maid. The flinching—eleven days ago. The weight loss around his collarbones—visible in the last week alone.

It wasn't anxious mothering anymore. It was a timeline. And timelines, Sera always said, were what convicted people.

The next morning I asked one of the housemaids—not the one who'd looked through me in the hallway, a younger one who still met my eyes—if I could go up to collect Peyton's winter things before the weather turned. She shrugged and said Camille hadn't given any instructions against it, so I supposed it was fine.

Peyton's room smelled like him still, underneath the rose-and-herb wrongness that had crept in from the rest of the house. I went to the closet first, pulled down two sweaters and his heavy coat, laid them over my arm like I had all the time in the world. Then I crossed to the toy chest.

I told myself I was looking for his snow boots.

Wedged between a stuffed bear and a wooden train set sat a book I had never seen before. Thick. Leather-bound, dark as dried blood. A seal pressed into the cover in wax the color of a fresh wound, and even from a foot away I could feel it—a low, humming pressure against my skin, the unmistakable weight of Alpha energy locked into something small.

I did not touch it.

I memorized its position instead. Second layer down, spine facing the hinge, half-covered by a folded quilt. I set the bear back exactly where it had been. I closed the chest.

I was almost to the door, boots in hand, when Peyton's fingers closed around mine.

"Mama." His voice was very small. His chin tucked left. "My tummy hurts a lot."

I went down on my knees so fast the boots dropped from my arm. I cupped his face in both hands. His skin was cool and damp under my palms.

"I know, baby." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I know it does. I'm going to fix it. But I need you to be brave for just a little longer. Can you do that for me?"

He nodded. He pulled Shadow up against his ribs and squeezed until his knuckles went white, and I memorized that too—filed it away with the seal and the timeline and everything else I was building, brick by brick, into something no one would be able to argue with.

Gerald arrived the day before the banquet with six warriors in Shadowmere colors, and the whole pack house rearranged itself around him like iron filings finding a magnet. Camille met him at the door, and I watched her warmth sharpen into something with edges—the sweetness she performed for Peyton gone, replaced by a cool, assessing calm that looked far more like her father's face than her own. Marilyn escorted Gerald through the halls with her hand nearly at his elbow, laughing at things that weren't funny, showing him renovations like she owned them.

Philip shook Gerald's hand in the front hall, and it wasn't a greeting. It was two men closing a deal.

I moved through the dining room adjusting place settings, invisible in my apron, and I saw it—Philip passing Gerald a folded document across the corner of the table, low, quick, Gerald's eyes flicking once toward the doorway before he tucked it into his coat.

I kept folding napkins. But something in my chest, low and old and patient, marked the moment and did not let it go.