My Mate Accused Me of Poisoning His Heir

I wake up to the pain before I wake up to anything else.

It starts behind my left eye — a white-hot spike that drives straight through to the back of my skull. I've learned not to gasp. Gasping brings Martha running, and Martha's face when she's worried is the one thing I can't afford to look at this early in the morning. So I press my lips together, count to eight, and wait for the worst of it to pass.

It always passes. For now.

'Miss Lily.' Martha's voice comes from the doorway before I've even opened my eyes. She has a sense for it — thirty years of reading a pack that never bothered to read her back. 'I've got the water warm.'

'Thank you, Martha.'

The transfer from the bed to the wheelchair is something we've reduced to a kind of choreography. She doesn't make it smaller than it is, and she doesn't make it bigger. She just helps, efficiently and without comment, and I love her for it in a way I've never said out loud.

The herbal paste is already laid out on the vanity. Dark green, thick as clay, smelling of crushed rosemary and something sharper underneath — a compound I developed myself, over months of quiet experimentation in the pack's medical wing. It masks the other smell. The one that's been creeping into my skin for the past few weeks like something left too long in the cold.

I know what it is. I'm a healer. I've sat with enough dying wolves to recognize the scent of a body beginning to lose its argument with itself.

I apply the paste to my wrists, the hollow of my throat, the inside of my elbows. Pulse points. Anywhere the blood runs close to the surface and carries the truth with it.

In the window, the sky is still gray. And there he is.

Jaxson runs the border every morning before the pack wakes. I used to run it with him — back when I had legs that worked and a wolf who loved the cold air and a version of myself that believed the bond between us was something he felt too. Now I watch from the second-floor window of the guest quarters I've been relocated to, and I count his strides the way I used to count my own, and I don't let myself feel it.

I'm very good at not letting myself feel things.

He disappears into the tree line. I turn away from the window.

---

The Alpha Ball is the Blood Moon Pack's annual performance of itself — all candlelight and formal wear and the careful theater of hierarchy made visible. I arrive early enough to choose my position: a spot near the east wall, beside the ramp, where the shadows are deep enough that I can see without being the thing people look at.

I'm wearing the deep blue gown Martha pressed this morning. My hair is up. I look,