Chapter 3

What the Bread Was Hiding

The stone beneath the Alpha's residence held the cold of winter no matter the season, and I had been sitting in it long enough to lose track of how many hours had passed since the doors closed behind me.

"You're not eating," Lyra said through the bars, setting down a tray she shouldn't have been allowed to bring.

"I'm not hungry."

"You need to eat regardless. Starving yourself won't prove your innocence any faster."

"Nothing I do is proving anything right now." I pulled my knees to my chest, the stone floor unforgiving beneath me. "How bad is it out there?"

Lyra hesitated, and that hesitation told me everything before she said a word.

"Tell me."

“The whole pack is talking about it. Some say you've been planning this since you were a child, waiting for the right moment to remove Aurora so you could become Luna without competition."

"That's insane. I didn't even know she was alive."

"I know. I believe you." She glanced over her shoulder, checking the corridor before lowering her voice further. "But belief doesn't carry much weight against witnesses and bloodstained evidence."

"What evidence?"

"A cloak. They found one near the cabin Aurora claims she was held in. They say it carries your scent."

My stomach turned. "I don't own a cloak like that."

"I know that too. Someone wants this to look convincing, Selene. Whoever is doing this isn't improvising."

"Has Kael said anything?"

Lyra's silence answered before her words did. "He hasn't come to see you."

"Of course he hasn't."

"He's not the same person he was this morning either. I saw him in the corridor an hour ago. He looked like someone who hadn't slept in days, not hours."

"Good," I said, and immediately hated myself for it. "He should suffer a little too."

"You don't mean that."

"No," I admitted quietly. "I don't."

Lyra reached through the bars and squeezed my hand, the only comfort either of us could offer in a place built to discourage exactly that. "I have to go before someone notices I'm here. Eat something, please."

"Lyra. Thank you. For believing me when no one else will."

"Always." She gathered her empty tray and disappeared up the stairs, her footsteps fading until the silence pressed in harder than before, broken only by the distant sound of guards changing shifts somewhere above.

Two guards came by not long after, neither bothering to lower their voices as they passed my cell.

"Hard to believe she fooled the future Alpha for ten years," one of them said.

"Blood always tells eventually," the other answered. "Just took longer with her than most."

I said nothing. There was no version of defending myself that would have changed their minds, and I had learned that lesson long before either of them was old enough to repeat it.

I tried to sleep. Sleep refused me, the way it had refused me as a child every time the other pack members reminded me what my father had supposedly done. I thought of his execution, of standing too small in the crowd to understand what was happening, of the years that followed where every mistake I made became proof that bad blood could never produce anything good.

I must have drifted eventually, because I woke to the sound of the cell door easing open.

No guard ever entered without announcing himself first.

I sat up, every instinct telling me to be afraid, but the figure that slipped inside moved with quiet purpose rather than threat. A hood obscured their face entirely. They said nothing as they knelt beside the small basin of water I had been given, replacing it with fresh water, then set down a small bundle of crushed herbs beside my untouched bruises.

"Who are you?" I whispered.

No answer. The figure simply finished their task and disappeared back through the door as silently as they had come, leaving me staring at the herbs with my heart hammering against my ribs.

This happened twice more over the following nights, always the same silence, always the same careful kindness from someone who clearly had no intention of being identified.

Each time, I tried to memorize something, anything, that might tell me who they were. The shape of their hands. The weight of their footsteps. The way they always paused at the door for exactly one breath before leaving, as though checking whether I intended to call out. I never did. Some instinct deeper than fear told me that whoever they were, calling for the guards would only put them in danger, and possibly end whatever fragile chance I had of learning the truth.

On the third night, after the figure left, I noticed the edge of the bread on my dinner tray had been disturbed, as though someone had pressed something into it and pulled it free again, leaving the crust slightly torn. Beneath it, folded so small I almost missed it, was a single piece of paper.

My hands shook as I unfolded it.

The handwriting was unfamiliar, careful and deliberate, as though the writer had taken great care to disguise it.

“Your father died protecting this pack. Stay alive long enough to learn why.”

I read it three times before the meaning settled fully into my chest, and when it did, every certainty I had built my life around since I was nine years old began to crack apart at once.

I pressed the paper flat against my palm, as if I could absorb whatever truth it carried directly into my skin. Someone inside Moonfang, someone with access to my cell and the patience to visit three nights in a row without being caught, wanted me to keep breathing long enough to ask questions I had spent my whole life too afraid to ask.

I did not know yet whether that made me safer, or simply gave whoever wanted me dead a better reason to act quickly.