The Woman Who Saved His Pack

By morning, the news had already spread through every level of Moonshadow Pack.

They had been saved. A billion dollars, delivered overnight, and the name attached to the miracle was Sophie Bennett. Darien called an assembly in the great hall before noon, and when he stood at the front of the room and told the pack who had rescued them, the applause that followed was loud enough to rattle the windows.

Ivy stood near the back, half hidden behind a pillar, and watched Sophie accept the applause with a bowed head and a hand pressed modestly to her chest, as though the attention embarrassed her.

It did not embarrass her. Ivy could see that from across the room. Sophie's eyes moved over the crowd the way a queen's eyes move over a coronation, counting the bows, counting the faces that now looked at her differently.

"I only did what anyone would have done," Sophie said, and the pack cheered louder.

Ivy slipped out before the assembly ended.

That evening, Darien found her in the kitchen, slicing vegetables for a dinner neither of them would end up eating together.

"There you are." He looked lighter than he had in weeks, the exhaustion gone from around his eyes, replaced with something almost boyish. "Did you hear? Sophie pulled it off. A billion dollars. I still can't believe it."

"I heard," Ivy said.

"She saved us, Ivy. All of it. The territories, the house, everything." He leaned against the counter, shaking his head slowly. "I don't know how to repay something like that."

Ivy set the knife down carefully. For a moment, the truth sat right behind her teeth, close enough to taste. *It wasn't her. It was me. I did that. I have been doing things like that since before you noticed I existed.*

She swallowed it.

"I'm glad the pack is safe," she said instead.

Darien crossed the kitchen and kissed the top of her head, distracted, already reaching for his phone. "You are too. I know the last few weeks have been hard on you. I promise, once things settle, I'll make it up to you."

Ivy nodded and said nothing else, because there was nothing else that would not have unraveled everything she had spent three years keeping carefully folded.

Later that night, her phone lit up with a message from Nightclaw.

*Transfer confirmed and received. Moonshadow's crisis is resolved. Your grandfather sends his regards, and a reminder. The seat is still waiting for you.*

Ivy read the message twice, then set the phone face down on her nightstand.

She thought of her grandfather, the way his study had smelled of cedar and old paper, the way he used to sit her on his knee when she was very young and tell her, quietly, that one day the whole weight of Nightclaw would rest on her shoulders and she would be ready for it, because he had made her ready.

She had run from that weight for three years. She had traded a throne for a hallway where a man told her whatever it was could wait until tomorrow.

*I don't want the throne,* she thought. *I want him to look at me the way he looked at her today.*

The thought embarrassed her even as she had it. She was a grown woman, an heir, a wife, and somewhere beneath all of that she was still the girl standing outside an office door with a wrapped box, waiting for eleven minutes to become one.

Across the city, Sophie sat in a private booth with a man whose face never appeared in any of Moonshadow's official records.

"It worked perfectly," she said, swirling the wine in her glass. "He held me like I'd hung the moon."

"And the real source of the money?"

"No one knows. Whoever it is wanted it kept quiet, which works out beautifully for me." Sophie's smile sharpened. "Darien trusts me completely now. He looks at me the way he used to look at her. Before long, he won't remember why he ever needed a wife in the first place."

"You still have to deal with Ivy."

"I'm well aware." Sophie set down her glass. "She's quiet. Weak. Barely an Omega worth mentioning. It won't take much."

"Don't underestimate a wife who's been humiliated," the man said. "Quiet women remember everything."

Sophie waved a hand, unbothered. "She's not going to do anything. She never does. That's the whole appeal of her." She leaned back, satisfied, certain of the shape of her own plan. "Once Darien divorces Ivy, I'll be Luna of Moonshadow. And no one, especially not her, is going to stop that from happening."

Neither of them noticed the shadow near the wall beside the booth, or the woman standing just beyond the curtain who had come to return a forgotten scarf and instead found herself frozen, listening, her hand pressed flat against her own racing heart.

Ivy did not move. She barely breathed.

Then, behind her, she heard the soft, deliberate sound of footsteps.