I should not have asked.
I knew better. Six years in this pack had taught me the specific, survival-level wisdom of keeping my mouth shut of swallowing questions whole, of letting confusion sit in my chest until it calcified into something I could live around. I knew better.
But I was exhausted in a way that had gone past physical, past the bleeding wounds on my back and the bruises already darkening along my arms. I was exhausted in the place where your judgment lives. And so when Alpha Kai turned from his desk and looked at me standing in his doorway dripping, trembling, held upright more by stubbornness than by any actual strength in my legs the question slipped out before the wiser part of me could catch it.
"Alpha." My voice was barely sound. Rough and torn and small. "What did I do to deserve this?"
The room went very still.
Kai turned slowly. He had been irritated when I walked in the controlled, iceberg kind of irritation, the kind that shows only its surface and keeps most of its danger hidden below. But at my words, something in his face shifted. Moved past irritation into a territory that had no name I wanted to give it.
"Are you questioning me?"
Quiet. He said it so quietly.
I had learned a long time ago that with the triplets, quiet was always worse than loud. Loud meant the emotion had escaped, had spent itself in the air between you. Quiet meant it was still contained, still building, still deciding what shape it wanted to take when it finally moved.
I should have taken it back. Should have shaken my head, dropped my eyes, made myself small and apologetic and invisible the way I had learned to do.
Instead, God help me, I kept going.
"I just want to understand," I whispered. "I want to know what I actually did."
He moved.
I didn't see it happen one moment he was across the room, the next his hand was around my throat and my back hit the wall with a force that sent white-hot lightning through every wound that hadn't finished bleeding. The impact knocked the air from my lungs completely. I grabbed his wrist with both hands not fighting, not strong enough to fight, just holding on because my body had gone into the animal panic of not being able to breathe and needed something to grip.
His face was inches from mine.
His eyes were burning.
"How dare you," he said softly. "You stand here. In my room. After everything. And you act innocent."
I tried to speak. Couldn't. His grip wasn't crushing not yet but it was immovable, a wall of pressure against my throat that made every breath a negotiation.
"I asked you to iron my clothes yesterday." Each word was deliberate. Precise. Laid down like stones. "I asked you to prepare them properly and leave them ready. Do you know what I wore to the council meeting? Do you know what I smelled like walking into a room full of alphas and elders?" His grip tightened slightly. "Damp cloth. Like something pulled off a line in the rain. Do you understand what that made me look like?"
My mind scrambled frantically through yesterday. Through the hours before the punishment, before Ayoya's staged tears, before the courtyard. I had not received instructions about clothing. No message had come to my room. No one had knocked, no note had been slipped under my door, nothing
"I didn't know," I choked out, my voice barely recognizable through the pressure at my throat. "Nobody told me. I didn't get any message "
"Excuses."
He shook me once, sharp and hard, and my back scraped against the wall and I stopped thinking in sentences for a moment, the pain dissolving everything into pure white static.
"That is all you ever have. Excuses. Explanations. Reasons." His voice had gone cold in the specific way of someone who has decided that what you say no longer matters, that the verdict was reached before you opened your mouth. "Tell me, Laura what have you not ruined? What have you touched in this pack that you haven't damaged somehow?"
Nothing, some hollow part of me answered. I haven't been allowed to touch anything.
"Even if you did nothing wrong today," he continued, "your parents did enough for a lifetime. Your father humiliated this pack. Your mother ran in the night like a coward. They left their shame behind and you are standing here wearing it."
Parents.
The word hit somewhere deeper than his hand could reach.
Because I could argue about Ayoya. I could insist about the clothes. I could defend myself against accusations I knew were false. But my parents that wound had never closed, never hardened over into something I could protect. It was still raw. It would always be raw. The people who were supposed to be the ground beneath my feet had simply chosen not to be, and six years of trying had not taught me how to stop feeling the fall.
Tears came without permission.
I hated them. I hated the way they came and could not be recalled, hated how they gave him exactly what he probably wanted confirmation that his words had found their mark, that he had the power to reach inside me and break things.
"Your wolf left you," he said, quieter now, which was somehow more devastating than when he shouted. "You know what that means? Even the animal inside you the most basic, instinctive part of a wolf could not endure being tied to you. You were born wrong, Laura. You have always been wrong. And no amount of counting days on your wall is going to change what you are."
My legs stopped working.
I didn't decide to collapse. My body simply made the decision without consulting me, knees folding, the floor rushing up, Kai's grip releasing as I crumpled so I didn't drag him down with me. I hit the marble on my hands and knees, gasping, air flooding back into my lungs in ragged, burning waves.
He stood over me.
I could feel him looking down without seeing his face. I could feel the specific weight of his gaze not anger anymore, something colder. Disappointment that had curdled into contempt.
"Pathetic," he said.
Just that. One word, quiet and final, and then the sound of him stepping away, done with me, moving toward the window as if the interaction had already left his mind.
I tried to make my arms hold me. They shook violently but held.
The room was spinning not metaphorically, actually moving, the walls tilting and sliding in ways they shouldn't. The combined weight of everything was catching up with me all at once: the lashes, Mike's room, no food, no water, the hand at my throat, the impact against the wall. My body was sending me a message in the only language it had left.
Enough. This has been enough.
"Get her out of my sight." Kai's voice came from somewhere across the room, directed at the door rather than at me, as if I had already ceased to be present. "She wants to question authority let her learn what happens when she does."
The guards came in. I registered their hands under my arms more than I felt them, sensation growing distant and unreliable. They pulled me upright, and I tried to cooperate, tried to make my legs perform the basic function of bearing weight, with limited success.
The hallway moved past me in fragments.
I caught whispers running ahead of us like something alive pack members stepping out of doorways, conversations halting mid-sentence, heads turning toward the sound of dragging feet and the quiet efficient cruelty of escorts who didn't need to hurry because I had nowhere to run.
The courtyard again.
Always the courtyard.
I thought, with a detachment that frightened me a little, that I was beginning to know this stone very well. The specific texture of it under my knees. The way the morning light hit it at different angles. The way sound carried across the open space and seemed to get louder rather than quieter, the way a stage amplifies everything that happens on it.
My knees met the ground.
Kai's voice came from the balcony above. I didn't look up.
"She will jump," he announced, carrying the words across the assembled pack with the calm authority of someone reading instructions for something entirely reasonable. "She will not stop until I say so. If she collapses, lift her. If she slows, correct her."
A pause.
"If any of you fail to enforce this, I will deal with you personally."
Laughter from somewhere in the crowd. Not everyone not all of them had become that. But enough. Enough to know that for some of the people I had grown up beside, this was entertainment. Something to watch on a morning that had otherwise been ordinary.
This is what I am to them, I thought. Not a person. Not even an enemy worth taking seriously. Just something to look at. A reminder of what happened when you were born from the wrong people, carried the wrong blood, couldn't produce a wolf willing to claim you.
A cautionary tale in a torn, blood-stained shirt.
"Jump."
The guard beside me said it softly. I glanced at him young, jaw tight, eyes that wouldn't quite meet mine. He didn't want this job. That was something, I supposed. A small and useless something.
I stood up.
And I jumped.
Up.
The wounds on my back tore open with the movement, fresh pain flooding through every lash line, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek and kept my face as still as I could make it. I would not give the balcony the satisfaction of my expression.
Down.
Up.
What did I do?
The question kept circling, patient and relentless as a wolf pacing a cage. I kept searching for the answer kept turning my life over looking for the moment, the choice, the action that had earned all of this. The specific sin. The thing I had done.
Down.
I had been born to the wrong parents.
That was it, wasn't it. That was the whole answer. I had been born, and they had left, and those two facts together had collapsed into a verdict that no amount of defense could overturn because it had never been about evidence. It had never been about what I did or did not do.
They hated me because I existed.
Up.
My legs were shaking badly now. The dizziness that had been building since Kai's hand closed around my throat was sharpening again, narrowing my vision at the edges, making the courtyard feel like it was very far away and very close at once.
Down.
"Traitor's daughter," someone said, just loud enough to carry.
I didn't look toward the voice.
Up.
I thought about Lue. About the hollow where she used to be, the silence I carried everywhere like a second shadow. I thought about the window I had sat at for years after my parents left, waiting with the blind, patient faith of someone too young to understand that some people don't come back.
I thought about six days.
Down.
The thought was almost laughable by now. Six days until the ceremony. Six days until the Moon looked down at the assembled pack and drew her threads between souls. Six days until I found out whether fate had set someone aside for me or whether I would stand in that hall and feel nothing no pull, no thread, no hand reaching across the distance between souls and know, finally, permanently, that I was alone in every way that mattered.
Up.
Please, I thought at the Moon, at the sky, at anything that might be listening. Please let there be someone. Please let this mean something. Please don't let all of this have been for nothing.
Down.
My legs gave out.
I didn't feel myself fall just one moment upright, the next the stone coming up fast, my hands hitting first, palms cracking against the courtyard floor. The guard was there immediately, hands under my arms, face tight with something between pity and fear.
"Don't stop," he whispered urgently. "Please don't stop, he's watching "
I looked up at him.
And in his eyes the guard who didn't want to be here, who had whispered please to me like I was someone worth pleading with I saw something I hadn't seen from anyone in this pack in a very long time.
He saw me.
Just for a second.
Just a flicker, there and gone.
But it was enough to make me push myself back upright.
Not for Kai on the balcony. Not for the pack watching with their curious, hungry eyes. Not even for the six days.
For the stubborn, battered, unkillable piece of me that refused refused to let them watch me stay down.
Up.
Down.
The courtyard blurred.
Faces dissolved into light and shadow.
My body became distant, something I was operating from far away, a machine running on the last of its fuel.
And somewhere above me, Kai watched in silence.
And somewhere inside me, Lue was quiet.
And I kept moving, because stopping was the one thing I would not give them.
Not today.
Not with six days left.
Not yet.