Done

MOONLIGHT REBORN

Chapter Three

Nova's POV

I sat on the edge of my bed with the door locked and Reid's photo open on my phone.

The little girl on a man's shoulders. My face. His laugh.

Alpha Conrad of Moonlight. My father. A man who had spent twenty years looking for a daughter he lost in a rogue attack when she was three years old, and I had spent those same twenty years inside the pack that had found me and decided an unmated Omega orphan was the lowest possible thing a person could be.

The distance between those two facts was so large I couldn't hold it all at once. So I didn't try. I set the phone face down on the mattress and sat with the silence for exactly as long as I could afford — maybe two minutes — then I put it away and started thinking practically.

Because that's what this life required. Not feelings. Not processing. Moves.

I had the photo of Caden and Sable in the garden saved in three places. I had Reid's number. I had one hundred million sitting in an account Caden didn't know existed. I had every compound ratio for the silver-poison antidote locked in my head where no encryption could touch it.

What I didn't have yet was an exit. A real one. Something structural, not just a phone call and a wire transfer.

I was still working through it when the knock came.

Three soft raps. Rylan's knock — I'd know it anywhere, that particular hesitant rhythm he used when he wanted something and was trying to seem harmless.

"Come in."

He opened the door and stood in the frame holding a mug with both hands. Steam curling off the top. His face was arranged into something approximating remorse — eyes down, shoulders forward, the full performance of a child who had been coached on what contrition looked like.

"I'm sorry about earlier," he said. "I was rude." He crossed the room and held the mug out. "I made you warm milk. I wanted to say sorry properly."

I looked at the mug.

In my previous life, Rylan had started bringing me warm milk around this exact point in the year. It had become a routine — his nightly apology ritual, he'd called it, and I had found it unbearably sweet. I'd thought it meant something was shifting between us, that maybe the distance I'd always felt from him was finally closing.

Three months after the milk started, my health began declining.

Gradual at first. Fatigue I blamed on the lab hours. Then joint pain. Then the organ deterioration that put me in that hospital bed for twenty-two days while my husband visited once and laughed about my death in someone else's bedroom.

I looked at Rylan's face. Five years old. Dark eyes watching me with a patience that didn't belong on a child his age.

Sable had coached him well.

"Put it on the nightstand," I said.

He set it down carefully, and some of the performance dropped off his face — just for a second, a flicker of something recalculating — before he reset it. "Caden wants you downstairs. He said it's important."

"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes."

Rylan left. I waited until his footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs.

"Mira."

My Delta stepped out from the connecting room. She'd been with me for four years — quiet, efficient, loyal in the particular way of someone who'd chosen their loyalty carefully rather than having it assigned. She was the only person in Silver Moon I trusted with anything.

I nodded at the mug. "Take that to the lab. Full panel — compounds, metals, organics. Everything. I want results before morning."

Mira looked at the mug, then at me. She didn't ask questions. She picked it up and left.

I went downstairs.

The living room had been rearranged since this morning. Subtly — an extra chair pulled in, Sable's jacket on the armrest of the couch like she'd been here long enough to get comfortable. Caden was standing at the window with his arms crossed, which was his thinking posture, which meant he'd been running scenarios before I walked in.

Sable was on the couch. Burns from the coffee were still visible above her collar, pink and raw. She stood when she saw me, and her eyes went through the precise sequence I was now very good at reading — calculation first, then the mask, then the smile.

She let go of Caden's arm when I came in.

"Nova." Caden turned from the window. "Sable has something she wants to run by us."

Sable straightened. "I've been doing some independent research," she said, with the careful delivery of someone who had rehearsed this. "Into the silver-poison compound. I think I've found a supplementary agent that could accelerate the timeline significantly. I'd like to join the lab team. Contribute properly."

I looked at her.

She had no medical background. No chemistry training. Her father was Silver Moon's Beta, which meant she'd grown up with rank but not discipline. Whatever she'd found, she hadn't found it herself — she'd either bought it, stolen it, or had someone hand it to her. And the reason she wanted inside the lab had nothing to do with helping the research.

She wanted access to my work. My notes. The parts of the compound process I kept in my own files, off the shared drive, because I had always operated on the instinct — never examined, never acted on, just quietly maintained — that what I built was mine to protect.

The instinct had been right all along.

"That's a great idea," I said.

Caden blinked.

Sable's smile held but something behind it stalled.

"Actually," I continued, "it's perfect timing. I've been carrying this project alone for too long. If Sable wants to take the lead on the silver-poison treatment, I'll hand over the current phase and take a few days off." I looked at Caden. "I've been running on empty. Some rest would help me come back sharper. And this way the project keeps moving."

The silence in the room had a specific texture. Caden was doing the math — he needed the antidote, he needed it to work, he needed to hand it to the Council in a form that would hold up to scrutiny. Sable taking the lead sounded good in theory. In practice, he knew, without being able to say it directly, that she was not me.

"Are you sure?" he said carefully.

"Completely." I smiled at Sable. "The lab's yours. I'll brief you on the current phase tomorrow morning."

Sable's mouth was still curved upward. Her eyes weren't participating. "That's — wonderful. Thank you, Nova."

"Of course." I glanced at the clock on the wall. "I'm exhausted. I'll be in my room."

I was at the bottom of the stairs when Caden said my name. I turned.

He was looking at me with an expression I'd seen before — uncertain, slightly off-balance, like a man who'd prepared for one conversation and found himself in a different one. "Is everything okay?"

"Better than it's been in a while," I said, and went upstairs.

The next morning I was in my car before seven.

The Valley Wolf Pack auction house was two hours east — technically neutral territory, which was why it worked as a market for things that didn't change hands easily inside individual packs. Rare herbs, medicinal compounds, land at pack borders. If you had the rank and the money to get through the door, you could buy almost anything.

I'd had my eye on a property there for months in my previous life. A manor house sitting on the border of Silver Moon and Valley territory, set back from the road with a walled garden big enough to grow a full medicinal operation. I had never bought it. I'd been too focused on the lab, too tied to the residence, too — in every quiet way — anchored to a life that was being constructed around my usefulness and nothing else.

Not this time.

I parked, crossed the lot, and walked toward the entrance.

The guard stepped into my path before I reached the door. Big, deliberately positioned, the kind of physical obstruction that's meant to communicate something before any words are exchanged. He looked me over once — the slow, assessing look of someone checking for rank markers — and found nothing that satisfied him.

His nostrils flared.

Werewolves read status through scent before anything else. And I had spent my entire life reading as Omega. No Alpha markers. No pack scent worth registering. Whatever signal I put out, it was apparently not sufficient for whatever he'd decided this entrance required.

"This event is for ranked wolves." His voice was flat. Final. The voice of someone who'd turned people away before and found it easy. "You need to leave."

"I'm here to bid on a property."

"Not today you're not." He stepped closer, enough to make the instruction physical. "Walk away."

"I'm the Alpha heir of Moonlight Pack." I kept my voice even. "Get your manager."

That landed wrong. The guard's expression shifted into something between contempt and amusement, the particular look of a person who's decided the person in front of them is either delusional or performing. He opened his mouth.

A laugh cut across the entrance.

I turned.

She was standing near the door with two other women flanking her, dressed like the event was a stage and she was the main act. I recognized her from the pack summit I'd attended with Caden two years ago — Julie. Daughter of Red Moon's Alpha. The kind of woman who had grown up being told her presence in a room was an event in itself.

She was looking at me the way you look at something that has briefly, mildly, entertained you.

"Moonlight's Alpha heir," she said. "That's the one." She glanced at the women beside her. "Alpha Conrad hasn't been seen in years, and now his long-lost daughter just shows up at an auction house." Her eyes came back to me. "You know what they do to people who impersonate Alpha bloodlines?"

I didn't answer.

Which was, for Julie, apparently worse than any response I could have given. The amusement left her face.

I reached for my phone to call Reid.

That's when she shifted.

End of Chapter Three