Chapter 2

I woke in the middle of the night to the glass door opening.

Brielle entered the moonflower conservatory with a lantern and soon found me lying in the empty planting bed.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding.”

I opened my eyes but said nothing.

She covered her nose and mouth with a folded cloth, then took a dark bottle from beneath a growing rack and poured its contents into the irrigation channel. A bitter scent spread through the garden. It was wolfsbane extract.

Wolfsbane suppressed a werewolf’s healing and could stop someone from breathing. Brielle knew I had seen her, yet she tossed the empty bottle beside me.

“You want to die so badly. I’m only helping you.”

She crossed the garden and pushed over several racks. Pots shattered, and white moonflower petals fell into the muddy water beneath her shoes.

Mother had grown those flowers herself. An attendant had told me she planted them every year after I disappeared because they had been her favorite while she was pregnant with me.

Brielle destroyed the last flower, stuffed her stained gloves beside me, and left.

The glass door closed, trapping the fumes inside. My wolf’s presence had always been weak, and once the poison suppressed my body, even lifting one hand became difficult.

I closed my eyes and let each breath grow shallower.

The next morning, an attendant entered the garden. Her scream woke the entire Alpha House.

By the time my parents and Adrian arrived, someone had pulled me from the planting bed. Mother did not look at me first. She knelt in the mud and lifted a crushed moonflower.

“Who destroyed these?”

Brielle entered behind Adrian and hurried to her side.

“Mom, Ivy was upset because she didn’t have a room. Maybe she only needed somewhere to sleep. Please don’t blame her.”

Mother looked at me with disappointment.

“You can be angry that we failed to prepare a room, but what did these flowers have to do with it?”

The wolfsbane had burned my throat, but I managed to force out a few words.

“It wasn’t me. The conservatory has a recording crystal. Check it.”

Brielle’s fingers tightened around Mother’s sleeve, and the color drained from her face.

Every room containing rare herbs was protected by a recording crystal. It preserved images of anyone who entered, although it could not record their voices.

Adrian looked at me coldly. “Then we’ll check it. Once it proves you’re lying, you will apologize to Brielle.”

The head attendant brought the crystal from its locked cabinet and placed it against the glass wall. Silver light spread across the surface, revealing the conservatory as it had appeared the night before.

Brielle appeared in the image with a cloth covering her nose and mouth. She looked around before pouring the dark bottle into the irrigation channel, overturning the growing racks, and grinding the moonflowers beneath her shoes. Before leaving, she pushed the stained gloves beside me.

No one spoke when the image faded.

Brielle sank to her knees and caught Mother’s hand.

“I was angry. Ivy was lying in the dirt where the attendants would find her. It looked as though we had refused to give her a bed, and I thought she wanted the entire pack to believe we had mistreated her.”

Her voice broke as she glanced toward the ruined flowers.

“I only meant to destroy the garden. I didn’t know the bottle contained wolfsbane or that the fumes could hurt her.”

Mother closed her eyes for a moment before pulling Brielle to her feet.

“You should have come to us instead of losing control. What you did was wrong, but admitting it matters.”

Father’s expression softened as soon as Brielle began to cry again.

“She has never studied medicinal herbs. She saw an unmarked dark bottle and acted without thinking. She destroyed the flowers, but she did not mean to poison anyone.”

No one asked why Brielle had covered her own nose before opening a bottle she claimed not to recognize. No one mentioned that concentrated wolfsbane trapped inside a glass room could have stopped my breathing before morning.

Adrian helped Brielle stand, then turned on me.

“None of this would have happened if you hadn’t chosen to sleep in the dirt. What were you trying to prove?”

“There was no room for me.”

Mother looked toward Father. “I thought you had arranged one.”

Father frowned. “I thought you had.”

For the first time, they seemed to realize that everyone in the Alpha House had welcomed me home without deciding where I would sleep.

Adrian’s face flushed with anger.

“Then you should have said something. First you crawled into a storage closet, and now you’re sleeping in a planting bed. You want the household to think we forced you into places no one else would use.”

I lowered my eyes and stopped answering. A place where I could lie still was enough. It did not matter whether it was a closet, a garden, or the ground outside.

My silence only made him angrier. He called the pack warriors inside.

“Take Ivy to the moonless cell. She can come out when she admits that she has been using this family’s guilt to punish us.”

Two warriors took me beneath the Alpha House and placed me inside the underground discipline room. Its thick stone walls dulled the pack link, but the room contained no silver and was not meant to harm anyone.

Adrian stood outside the door while I struggled to remain upright.

“You’ll come out when you’re ready to tell the truth.”

After the stone door closed, I lay down beside the wall and listened until their footsteps disappeared.

Near midnight, the lock turned again. Brielle entered with a cup of water and a small flask of lamp oil while the guard waited beyond the open door.

“Mother asked me to bring this,” she said. “She wants us to stop fighting.”

She set the water beside me, then complained that the room was cold and slid the cover over the narrow air vent. While pretending to refill the wall lamp, she emptied a second vial into its oil reservoir, keeping the movement hidden beneath her sleeve.

As she passed me on her way out, she bent close enough to whisper, “This time, there isn’t a recording crystal.”

The door closed behind her. As the flame warmed the oil, a familiar bitter scent slowly spread through the sealed room.

It was wolfsbane.