Chapter 4
I found the technical coordinator through the Ceremony's official planning committee — a young wolf named Petra, mid-twenties, ambitious enough to want to impress the hosting Luna and not yet experienced enough to ask the right questions. I called her three days before the event and told her I wanted to prepare a tribute reel for Alpha Dante's leadership contributions. Something to open the proceedings. A surprise.
She was delighted.
'Of course, Luna Eloise,' she said. 'I can set you up with override credentials for the main display system. You'll have full control of all six screens from a tablet at the presenter's podium.'
'Perfect,' I said. 'And the upload partition — is it separate from the main presentation queue?'
'Yes, it's a secure staging area. Nothing goes live until you push it manually.'
'Wonderful.' I smiled into the phone. 'Let's keep this between us. I want it to be a real surprise.'
She promised. She sounded genuinely touched that the Luna cared enough to plan something personal.
I spent the next two evenings with Sienna in the east wing library, the door locked, the curtains drawn. She had routed the archive access through a clean channel exactly as she promised, and together we built the presentation file — not a tribute reel, but something else entirely. Forty-seven minutes of security footage, compressed and timestamped. The mind-link audio, clipped to the most damning thirty seconds and then the full fourteen-minute recording behind it. The dosage logs, formatted into a clean visual chart that showed three years of sedative suppressant administered weekly under the label of mark preparation therapy. The financial trail — six payments, eighteen months, Bryce Tanner's shell company, the amounts that matched the healer's fee schedule almost exactly.
And the transcript. The archived thread. Dante's own words: *The ritual would have shown my wolf was never damaged.*
Fiona's response underneath it: *She's so desperate to believe you love her. It's almost sad.*
I tested the override sequence the first night. It ran clean. I tested it again the second night with Sienna watching the display feed from a separate device across the room. The screens switched on cue, the files loaded in order, the audio synced without lag.
I tested it a third time at midnight, alone, because I needed to know that my hands could do it without shaking.
They could.
I didn't sleep after that. I sat at the desk in the east wing and watched the clock move from midnight to one to two, and I thought about my father. He had built the backup server that stored the mind-link archives. He had set up the private cloud account under a name that wasn't mine. He had told me, once, sitting in this same library with a glass of scotch and a stack of financial reports, that the most dangerous thing a Luna could be was legible. *If they can read you,* he said, *they can manage you. Don't be readable.*
I had been readable for three years. I had been an open book — every page of grief and patience and desperate hope laid out for Dante to annotate at his leisure.
Not anymore.
At some point before dawn I went to the window and stood there in the dark, and I let myself feel it — just for a moment, just once, before I had to put it away again. The Thanksgiving counter. The cream sweater I bought her for Christmas. Forty-seven injections. Every morning I sat across from him at breakfast and smiled and believed that the pain in my body was medicine.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and breathed.
Then I put it away. There would be time to feel it later. There would be a whole life to feel it in, on the other side of tomorrow.
---
The morning of the Ceremony, I was up before six.
I showered and dried my hair and stood in front of my closet for exactly thirty seconds before I reached past the modest gray dress Dante had suggested — still hanging there, still unworn — and pulled out the burgundy one.
Floor-length. Deep, dark red, the color of something that has already decided. My mother had owned a dress like this. She used to say that certain clothes were not about beauty. They were about intention.
I put it on. I did my makeup slowly and carefully, the way I used to before the injections made my hands unreliable. I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked like someone I recognized — someone I hadn't seen in a long time.
My wolf stirred.
She was still weak. Three years of suppression didn't reverse in three weeks, and I could feel the places where she was still thin, still hollow, like a muscle that had been kept in a cast too long. But she was awake. She had been awake since the night I stopped the injections, growing incrementally stronger each day, and this morning she pressed against the inside of my chest with something I hadn't felt from her in so long that it took me a moment to name it.
Anticipation.
Not the dull, medicated waiting I had lived in for three years. Not the anxious hope that the next injection would be the last one, that the bond would finally complete, that Dante would finally look at me the way I needed him to. This was something sharper and cleaner. This was a wolf who knew what was coming and wanted to see it.
I picked up the tablet from my desk. Opened the override interface. The staging partition was armed, the files loaded, the sequence ready. One tap to initiate. One tap.
I checked it once. Closed the interface. Slipped the tablet into the slim case I would carry to the Ceremony.
I reviewed the evidence file one last time — not because I needed to, but because I wanted to walk into that room having looked at every piece of it with clear eyes. The dosage logs. The financial trail. The footage. The transcript. All of it exactly as I had assembled it, exactly as I had verified it, exactly as it was.
I closed the file.
I stood before the mirror one more time. The woman looking back at me was wearing burgundy and had steady hands and a wolf who was growling low and quiet and ready.
Dante had told me to wear something modest. He had told me not to draw attention from the real business.
I thought about that as I picked up my bag and walked to the door.
Then I walked out without looking back.
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