Chapter 4

I could not cross the forest path home without someone walking beside me.

That was how I learned what Caelan had really taken.

The pack car left me at the edge of the south trail because the lane to my therapy house had been washed out by last week's rain. It was a path I had walked alone for years, sometimes after midnight, sometimes with frightened patients beside me.

Now Elias kept pace at my left because the woods went quiet when they sensed a wolfless woman.

"This is temporary," he said.

"Temporary is still a life," I answered.

At home, my keys shook in my hand. My wolf had always warmed before I reached the door. She had been the first part of me to know I was safe.

Caelan was waiting in the kitchen.

He had lit the stove and set out the tea I drank after long counseling nights. The gesture was so familiar it almost made me angry enough to break something.

"I arranged guards," he said. "You won't be alone."

"You arranged my weakness. Don't call the cage you built protection."

His mouth tightened. "Milo was dying."

"I know." I set both hands on the counter until the room stopped tilting. "That's why this is worse. You knew I might say yes. You just didn't want to risk hearing no."

For the first time, he looked afraid of me—not because I had a wolf, but because I did not.

Elias placed a sealed notice on the table. The council would decide by tomorrow night whether the blood-moon book could be formally opened. Until then, Caelan could not contact the healers alone or move any record from the infirmary.

The notice was not justice. It was a door held shut for one night.

I took my overnight bag from the closet.

"Where are you going?" Caelan asked.

"Somewhere you can't use my recovery as another reason to speak for me."

By sunrise, the council would decide whether his lie became a case—or disappeared into the stone.

I left the house before he could offer another guard, another schedule, another version of care that began with him deciding what I could survive. Elias drove me to the small apartment above my old therapy office. It smelled like dust and lavender soap, and no one had a key except me.

At the window, I watched the forest darken toward morning. My wolf still did not answer. But the silence was different here. No command lived in it any more. What was left was a wound I could name.

I set the sealed notice on the table and turned off my phone before Caelan could call again.