ASHES AND EMERALD

She felt it again.

Vivienne Marlowe paused on the bottom step of the estate's east staircase, one hand resting on the cold iron railing, and turned her head toward the window that overlooked the garden.

Nothing.

Just the dark tree line and the pale wash of moonlight across the dying grounds.

She released a slow breath and turned away.

You're losing your mind, she told herself. Again.

It had been happening more frequently these past three days, a sensation like a hook behind her ribs being pulled taut, a ghost-pressure along the mate bond that was supposed to be severed. Dead. She had convinced herself it was dead, because the alternative that Magnus was alive and had simply stayed away was a cruelty she refused to entertain.

"Luna Vivienne."

She turned.

Petra, one of the younger pack omegas, stood at the corridor entrance, eyes downcast in the submissive posture that had become second nature to everyone in the Silver Moon Pack over the past three years. The sight of it still made Vivienne's stomach turn. These wolves had once walked with their heads high.

Isla had broken that out of them. Systematically. Deliberately.

"What is it?" Vivienne asked, keeping her voice even.

"Lady Isla requests your presence in the banquet hall. The toast is beginning."

Lady Isla. The title still scraped against the inside of her skull like gravel.

"Tell her I'll be there shortly."

Petra nodded and disappeared. Vivienne turned back to the window. The tree line was still and silent, silver-washed and empty.

She pressed two fingers against the inside of her wrist, against the faint scar there a thin line she had put there herself in a moment of desperate wolf-ritual eighteen months ago, trying to sever what remained of the mate bond. The pack elder, old Senna, had warned her it wouldn't work. That a true Alpha bond couldn't be cut by anything less than death.

Old Senna was dead now too. Another casualty of the New Order.

Vivienne pulled her sleeve down and walked toward the banquet hall.

The hall had been transformed from the warm, amber-lit gathering space she remembered into something colder. Grayson Steele's aesthetic marble and silver and the kind of austere power that didn't invite comfort. The long tables were full of his wolves, broad and crimson-eyed, eating and drinking with the entitlement of conquerors. The surviving Silver Moon wolves sat at the far ends, quieter, smaller somehow, as if proximity to the "Real Wolves" had literally diminished them.

At the head of the primary table, Isla Voss held court.

She was striking in the way a drawn knife was striking, precise, cold, designed entirely for harm. Tonight she wore the pale silver ceremonial robes that had once belonged to the Luna position. Vivienne's robes, repurposed without a word of acknowledgment.

Isla's coin-bright eyes found Vivienne the moment she entered, and her red mouth curved.

"There she is," Isla said, loud enough to command the room's attention. "Our favorite little relic."

Low laughter from Grayson's wolves. The Silver Moon members didn't laugh. They didn't react at all, which was its own kind of grief.

Vivienne moved to her assigned seat three places down from the head of the table, a deliberate demotion and sat with the controlled stillness she had spent two years mastering. Reacting to Isla was feeding her. Vivienne had learned that early.

Grayson Steele was not present tonight. He rarely attended the estate events, preferring his mountain stronghold to what he considered the "domesticated" Silver Moon territory. He descended only when something required his direct intervention.

That absence was both a relief and a warning.

When Grayson didn't bother to show up, it meant he considered the situation thoroughly beneath his attention. He believed the Silver Moon Pack was broken.

He wasn't entirely wrong.

But he hadn't met the wolves in Vivienne's network.

Under the table, her fingers closed around the folded note that Corin the scarred young wolf, her most trusted lieutenant, had pressed into her palm on the steps. She hadn't opened it yet. She unfolded it now, keeping it below the table's edge, her face perfectly composed.

Three words were scratched onto the paper in Corin's jagged handwriting.

He is here.

Vivienne's heart stopped.

Two seconds of pure, treasonous stillness.

Then her training locked back into place, and her face remained as still as winter water, and she lifted her wine glass and brought it to her lips with a steady hand.

He.

There was only one he that Corin would risk a note for. Only one that would require those three words instead of a name.

Her fingers were not entirely steady when she set the glass back down.

She did not look at the window.

She did not look at the tree line beyond the glass.

She absolutely, deliberately, did not acknowledge the feeling behind her ribs that hook pulling taut that had suddenly become impossible to dismiss as imagination.

Isla raised her glass at the head of the table.

"To three years of ascension," she said, her voice carrying the length of the hall. "And to the ghosts who were wise enough to stay gone."

The crimson-eyed wolves drank.

Vivienne lifted her glass.

And somewhere in the dark beyond the window, the ghost

was already planning his return.