I had exactly enough time to get back to my room, wash the faint mark from Cael's blood transfusion off the inside of my arm, and remind myself three times that today was not about last night.
The Blood Moon Alpha was coming. The whole pack was already wound tight with it. Whatever I was carrying could wait.
It was good at waiting. It had been waiting my whole life.
I was still standing at my mirror pressing concealer carefully over the last of the bruising when the knock came. Soft. Specific. The kind that didn't demand anything.
I knew it before I opened the door.
Mum stood in the hallway with Dad just behind her, both of them already dressed, both of them looking at me with the particular expression they had been wearing since the day they found me that careful quiet attention, like they were always checking that I was still there. Still whole. Still theirs.
I had been a foundling. No name, no pack, no origin just a baby wrapped in unmarked cloth, left on the water, kept by the river long enough for someone to find her. That someone had been them. They hadn't hesitated, which was the part that had always undone me when I let myself think about it too long. They had looked at something the world had set adrift and decided, without discussion, that she was worth keeping.
I had never stopped being grateful. I had also never stopped wondering what it said about me that I had been left in the first place.
"You're up," Mum said, like it was a relief.
"I..I'm up," I agreed.
She looked at my face not the concealer, not the bruising underneath it, but my eyes and whatever she found there made her reach out and tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. The same gesture she had been making since I was small enough to sit in her lap.
Dad leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed, watching me with that quiet steadiness of his. He had never been a man of many words. He had always made the ones he used count.
"How are you feeling?" he asked.
"B-better." It was true enough. "Nervous."
"About today?"
I nodded, stepping back to let them in. Mum came inside immediately. Dad followed, closing the door softly behind him.
"Good nervous or bad nervous?" Mum asked, sitting on the edge of my bed in the easy way of someone who had sat there a hundred times before.
"Is there a d-difference?"
Dad's mouth curved. "There is. Good nervous means you care. Bad nervous means you're afraid."
I thought about that. "B-both, then."
He nodded like that was the right answer.
I sat beside Mum and looked at my hands. The bruising on my knuckles had faded to that yellowed almost-gone stage. Another day and it would be invisible entirely. I was always grateful for that the way damage eventually stopped being visible even when it hadn't stopped being real.
"Tell me about Alpha Titan," I said.
The room shifted slightly. Not dramatically just that small adjustment that happens when a conversation moves from safe ground to something that requires more care. Mum glanced at Dad. Dad unfolded his arms.
"What do you want to know?" he asked.
"E-everything. Everyone downstairs looked like they'd been told a storm was coming. I want to understand why."
Mum smoothed her hands over her knees. "Blood Moon is the King's pack. His enforcement pack the right hand of the throne. They don't visit for pleasantries." She paused. "Alpha Titan has led them for a long time. He is " she chose her words carefully, the way she always did when something mattered "not someone who comes into a space and leaves it the way he found it."
"M-meaning?"
"Meaning he is coming here because something may be wrong," Dad said
"Reginald," Mum said softly.
"She asked," he said simply. "Better she knows."
I looked between them. "H-has Blood Moon ever been here before?"
"No," Mum said. "And that is part of why today matters. A welfare check from the King's enforcement pack is not a small thing, Nova. It means someone has raised a concern. It means they are looking for something."
The missing girls.
The thought arrived quietly and sat down heavily. I thought about Sophia's voice in the dark I can decide what stays buried and felt the cold of it move through me all over again.
I didn't say it out loud. I filed it away in the place I had been filing things since last night. That place was getting crowded.
"So we k-keep our heads down," I said.
"We keep our heads down," Mum agreed. She reached over and covered my hand with hers. "You especially. You stay quiet, you do your job, you don't draw attention." Her fingers tightened slightly. "Okay?"
"O-okay," I said.
Dad pushed off the wall and kissed the top of my head on his way to the door unhurried, certain, the way he did everything. "You'll be fine," he said, like it wasn't a comfort but a fact. "You always are."
They left me to finish getting ready.
I sat for a moment after the door closed, in the quiet they had made comfortable just by being in it, and thought about a baby on the water and a man who cut like a blade and a pack that had raised a concern someone wanted kept buried.
I need to know where I came from.
Steadier today than last night. Less like grief. More like the beginning of something I hadn't named yet but wasn't going to put down.
I finished my concealer, straightened my shoulders, and went to make the best coffee of my life.
..
The kitchen was already thrumming by the time I arrived. I checked in with Nevaeh, who set me to hot water and complimentary snacks without looking up from her clipboard. I fell into the rhythm of it hands busy, head down, the familiar comfort of having something specific to do and let the tension in the air move over me rather than into me.
They've arrived, I thought, when the pressure thickened suddenly. You didn't need a wolf to feel it. You just needed to have lived here long enough.
Nevaeh reappeared twenty minutes later, her stressed face wearing a small determined smile. "Three Irish, two dopios, two black coffees, two cappuccinos. Three drinks each, girls."
"W-which "
"The Alphas all want Irish." She looked directly at me. "Nova, you are best at coffee. I want you on those three please. No burnt coffee, girls. Thank you."
She was gone before I could respond.
Julie and Katie rubbed my shoulders in solidarity before turning to their own orders. I stood for a moment looking at the three cups in front of me and thought, with a quiet and slightly hysterical clarity, that the most powerful Alpha in the King's service took his coffee the same way Steven did.
Of course he did.
I got to work. My hands didn't shake as badly as I expected. I had made this drink more times than I could count Steven's standing order at every pack meeting, every late night, every early morning. My hands knew it the way they knew anything done often enough. By the time all three were done I was almost calm.
Almost.
The three of us stood at the kitchen doorway and looked at each other. Julie went first, chin lifted, performing confidence rather than feeling it. I followed.
The walk to the office felt longer than usual. The authority in the air pressed against me the closer we got thick, layered the kind of power that had Julie and Katie dropping their heads before we even reached the doors. I kept mine level. Not out of bravado. I just couldn't afford to look like I was already defeated before I walked in.
The two guards outside glanced down at us. A pause the brief silence of mind linking and then both doors opened at once.
Steven sat behind his glass desk, Alpha Damien to his left and Beta Tobias to his right. The room was calmer than I had expected not tense so much as carefully arranged, everyone performing ease with the skill of people who had something to prove.
Five males sat on the other side of the desk, their backs to us.
The power coming off two of them reached me before I was three steps inside. It moved against my skin like pressure before a storm nothing to do with rank or title, everything to do with something older. Julie and Katie had nearly folded under it. I didn't, which surprised me almost as much as it would have surprised anyone else.
No wolf. No rank. By every law this pack ran on I should have been the first one on the floor.
I filed that away and kept walking.
"Girls, glad you're here." Steven smiled, and the small reassurance in it was only visible if you knew what to look for.
I placed his coffee in front of him and his hand brushed mine briefly on the mug a small deliberate steadying gesture so subtle no one else would have caught it.
Alpha Damien was next. He smiled up at me and pressed a kiss to the back of my hand in the way he had been doing since I was small unhurried, grandfatherly, like I was worth every second of it. He had taken in a foundling no one could name and given her a roof and people who chose her. Not many alphas would have.
I swallowed that down and kept moving.
From the corner of my eye, a pair of brown eyes found me before I found them. I glanced up and recognised the Beta from the party. The one I had spilled champagne on. He was watching me with something that sat between recognition and what looked almost like nervous anticipation. I filed that away too. Everything today was getting filed away. I was running out of room.
I turned to the Alpha.
Black jeans. A blood-red button shirt. Arms that suggested someone who had never needed a weapon because he had always been one. One hand rested on the arm of the sofa with the stillness of someone who had learned very early that they didn't need to move to command a room. The other waited, open, for the coffee on my tray.
Just a drink, I told myself. You have made this drink a hundred times. Hand it over and walk away.
Stopping before him, I took a deep breath as I picked up his drink: the scent of him was intoxicating. So intoxicating in fact, that when I got closer to hand him the coffee my deeper breath caught in my throat. All it took was the gentle brush of his finger against mine on the glass for my world to come crumbling down.