The Last Dose

Juni’s POV

"You're early," Bram says, and I know from his voice alone that something's wrong.

"I saw the notice." I push past him into the shop before he can stop me, my heart still hammering from the walk over. "The one nailed up on Corner Row.”

"There's one on every corner this side of the river." He shoulders the door shut behind me and slides the bolt home, hard, then flips the little wooden sign hanging in the window without even looking at it. "Selection's in three days."

"I need the usual." I drop my coin pouch on the counter between us. The leather's worn soft from years of this same exchange. "Whatever you can give me."

He doesn't reach for it.

That's what scares me before he even opens his mouth.

"Bram."

"I don't have it, Juni."

"You always have it."

"Not this month." He drags a hand down his face, and for the first time since I've known him, he looks old. Properly old. Not just tired. "Every pack loyal to the old law is scouring this territory for suppressant stock ahead of the gathering. Buying it up. Burning what they can't buy. I had three bottles Tuesday. I sold two to men more desperate than you, and I'm not selling you the last one, because it isn't clean anymore. There isn't clean left in this district."

My mouth goes dry. "What does that mean?"

"It means the only thing I've got left is something a boy two streets over cooked up himself." He reaches under the counter and sets a small vial on the wood between us — murky, dark, nothing like the clear glass I've carried in my coat for ten years. "It might hold your scent down a few days. It might do nothing at all. I don't know, and neither does he."

I stare at it like it's already decided something without asking me.

"How much."

"Take it or don't. I'm not charging you for a promise I can't make."

"Bram—"

"Take it." His voice cracks, just slightly, just enough that I understand exactly how much this is costing him. "It's three days to Selection. If you've got nothing in your blood when they start sweeping the district, it won't matter whether it's clean. It'll already be over."

I pick it up slowly, turning it over in my fingers. It's lighter than it should be — lighter than ten years of the same bottle taught my hand to expect. "How long have you been doing this, Bram? Really. I've never asked."

"Long enough to know better." He starts wiping down the counter that's already clean, the way he does when he wants his hands busy instead of still. "My sister was one. An Omega. Long before you ever walked through that door."

I go quiet. In all the years I've been coming here, he's never once said that out loud.

"She didn't hide as well as you do," he says, not looking up. "That's all I'll say about it. I got into this trade because I was too late to help her, and I decided I wasn't going to be too late again. You're not the only one I've kept stocked over the years, Juni. You're just the one who's lasted the longest."

"I didn't know that."

"No reason you should have." He sets the rag down and finally looks at me properly, the way he hasn't since I walked in. "That's why I'm telling you to leave tonight and not tomorrow. Not because I don't want your coin. Because I've watched this exact week happen before, and I know what it looks like right before it goes wrong."

"Thank you," I whisper, because I don't know what else to say to a man who just handed me the only thing standing between me and everything I've spent a decade running from — and something else, now, that I don't have a name for yet.

"Don't thank me." He's already pulling a canvas bag down off a hook, moving like he's rehearsed this exact motion in his head a hundred times. "I'm closing up tonight. Leaving before the gathering starts. You should think about doing the same, while there's still road left to do it on."

"I can't leave without knowing it works first."

"Then you'd better hope that boy knew what he was doing." He doesn't look at me again. "Go, Juni. Guards start sweeping this afternoon. Don't be standing in my doorway when they come down this street."

I tuck the vial into the deepest pocket of my coat, over my heart, and step back out into the cold.

The notice is still wet with paste when I pass it, white paper slapped crooked over the gray stone like a fresh scar.

“Selection Summons — Unclaimed Omega. Female, slight build, brown hair, last seen Lower Row district. Present yourself before the gathered packs or be brought before them.”

I don't stop walking. I don't read it twice. Someone's always watching to see who stops.

It isn't my name printed anywhere on it. It's never my name — Silas made sure of that years ago, before Bram, buried my real one under enough false papers that no clerk in this territory could find it if they tried. But the description doesn't need my name. It just needs to be close enough that someone looks at me twice on a street this crowded, and today, three days before the gathering opens, everyone's looking.

I pull my hood down another inch and keep my pace even. Not fast. Fast gets noticed. I turn off the main road at the tallow-chandler's stall, cut through the alley and continued walking as swiftly as my legs could carry me.

---

The streets get louder the closer I get to the Summit grounds, until by the time I reach the main avenue the whole city feels like it's holding its breath and cheering at the same time.

Banners hang from every post — the Council's crest in silver, and beside it, house crests I don't recognize, each one belonging to a pack important enough to be summoned for the gathering. Guards line the road in double rows, spears crossed, holding the crowd back onto the walkways, and every window above the shopfronts has someone leaning out of it, craning for a look.

I pass two more notices on the way, one still being pasted up by a boy with a bucket of glue who doesn't so much as glance at me, and I make myself walk past both without slowing, the same way I've walked past a hundred others over the years. It doesn't get easier. It just gets more familiar, which isn't the same thing at all.

I should turn around here. I know that. A crowd this size, this close to Council guards actively sweeping for a face like mine, is exactly the kind of place Bram would tell me to avoid on a good day, let alone today.

But the current of people moving toward the avenue is stronger than my good sense, and before I've fully decided anything, I'm jammed between a baker's cart and a woman holding a child up on her shoulders to see over the crowd.

"Which pack is it?" the woman asks no one in particular, craning her neck.

"Voss," someone answers from further up. "Whole column of them. They say the Alpha himself rides at the front, no helmet, wants everyone to see his face."

"Man like that doesn't need a helmet," someone else laughs. "Nobody's fool enough to raise a hand to him."

"Make way!" a guard shouts, using the shaft of his spear to push the crowd back another step. "Clear the road — the Voss procession is coming through!"

The noise swells. I could still turn back now, cut through the crowd toward one of the side streets, put distance between myself and this many watching eyes before the column even arrives. I tell myself I will. I tell myself that with every second I don't move.

The lead riders come through first — dark cloaks, dark horses, the kind of controlled, silent movement that belongs to wolves who've never once needed to raise their voice to be obeyed. Guards on foot flank them, then more riders, banners snapping in the wind off the mountains behind the city walls.

Then the procession slows, and the man at its head brings his horse to a stop almost directly across from where I'm standing.

He doesn't look like the others.

It isn't his size, though he's easily the largest man in the column. It's the way the crowd's noise seems to drop half a step lower the moment he stops, like even the air knows to make room for him. The cheering doesn't die completely — a few voices further down the avenue keep calling out, reaching for his attention — but around me, in this small stretch of street, it's like everyone forgot to keep talking at the same time.

I feel the dose start to work loose in my blood — warm, at first — and for one stupid, hopeful second I think it's just settling the way it's supposed to. The way ten years of practice has taught my body to expect.

Then the warmth turns to fire.

It happens too fast to brace for. A burning that starts low in my stomach and claws upward, nothing like the slow, familiar settling I've felt a hundred times with Bram's real medicine. My knees go weak. My vision blurs at the edges, the banners and the crowd smearing into color and noise.

"Not now."The thought comes sharp and useless, because my body has never once cared what I needed it to do. "Not here."

I press a hand flat against the baker's cart to steady myself, and when I lift my head to breathe, to try to find some clear air over the crowd, I find him already looking at me.

Not a glance. Not the accidental sweep of someone scanning a street full of strangers. He looks straight at me, straight through me, like everyone else on the avenue just stopped existing.

My breath catches behind my ribs.

I don't know this man. I've never seen his face before in my life. But something in his expression shifts the second our eyes meet. It sharpens, locks, like he's found something he wasn't looking for and can't make himself look away from now that he has.

The fire in my blood climbs higher, and for one terrifying heartbeat I understand, with total clarity, that whatever Bram's untested medicine just did to me, it isn't working the way it's supposed to.

It's doing the opposite.

I take one step back into the crowd, breaking his gaze, and turn to run — shoulder catching hard against the woman with the child, a muttered apology I don't have time to finish — but the burning is already spreading up through my chest, climbing toward my throat, and somewhere behind me, over the noise of the procession and the cheering crowd, I hear a horse break formation.