POWER SMELL Nice

Chapter 4

Freya's claws are a breath from my throat when a wall of muscle and fur slams into her from the side.

The impact throws her sideways into a fruit stand, crates splitting apart, herbs scattering across the cobblestones. I stumble back, heart hammering, ears ringing from how close that was, and find Silas standing between us in his shifted form, silver-grey and massive, teeth bared toward the she-wolf sprawled in the wreckage.

Four Gamma warriors fan out behind him, and every one of them wears the same crescent mark stitched into their collars. Moonlight.

I've never seen anyone move to protect me like this. Not once, in either life. My father's people arrived on a street corner for a woman they'd known about for less than a day, and somehow that lands harder than the slap did.

Freya scrambles upright, chest heaving, murder still in her eyes — until she actually looks at that mark. Her whole posture folds in on itself like a tent losing its poles. She backs up a step, then another, hands raised in front of her like she can push the last thirty seconds back into the past.

"I didn't know," she says. "I didn't know she was—"

"Convenient," I say. "You didn't know when your hand hit my face either."

Nobody moves to defend her. Not the guests who scattered to watch her tear into an Omega a minute ago, not the guard who wouldn't let me through the door. He's already backing toward the building, and a second man comes jogging out to meet him, older, sharp-suited, clearly in charge of more than just crowd control.

"What happened here?" he demands, and the guard starts stammering an explanation that dies halfway through when the man's gaze lands on Silas's warriors, then on me.

"Delta Cole," the man says, introducing himself before I can ask. "I run this auction house. I am so sorry — this should never have happened at my door." He rounds on the guard with a look that could strip paint. "You put your hands on the Moonlight heir. Apologize. Now."

The guard's apology comes out fast and shaking, eyes on the ground, hands clasped in front of him like a man begging for his job instead of forgiveness. I don't bother acknowledging it. I've had enough of people who only respect a name once they've been told to fear it. An hour ago this same man told me to get lost. Now he can't get the word "please" out fast enough, and it tells me everything about how thin his convictions actually run.

Cole personally walks me and Silas inside, past velvet ropes and hushed bidders who watch us pass like we're the most interesting thing to happen at this auction in years, straight to the private office where the deed I came for is waiting. The mansion is mine within twenty minutes, signed, sealed, the border land with its half-turned garden finally belonging to someone who'll actually use it.

While Cole finalizes the paperwork I wander the floor and find crates of moonflower, pale and threaded with silver veins, and moongrass bundled in dozens. A trader tells me both are nearly impossible to source outside Moonlight territory anymore, that most of what's on this floor came from a single harvest three years back and won't be replaced until spring. I think of the formula waiting to be rebuilt from nothing, of every version I ever fed Adrian's lab being watered down and mismeasured on purpose, and I buy every crate they'll let me carry out the door. Both go on the deed alongside the house. I don't know yet exactly what I'll do with all of it. I know I'll need it.

*

Silas doesn't speak again until we're in the car, and when he does, his voice has lost its earlier ease.

"We should go to the hospital," he says. "Now. Before it's too late."

I nod, and the drive stretches out long and quiet, my own reflection flickering in the window between passing buildings. A father I've never met. A father who spent eighteen years paying strangers to find a little girl who thought no one wanted her. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel walking into that room. Grief for a life I never had. Grief for the one about to end before I've had the chance to have it.

My phone buzzes against my leg. Adrian.

I let it ring out.

It starts again before the screen even goes dark.

I answer on the fourth attempt mostly to make it stop.

"Vera, thank the goddess." He sounds unraveled, breath uneven, noise crashing behind him — voices shouting over each other, something that might be Ines crying. "Ines's compound failed. It didn't just fail, it made it worse — three warriors who took the trial dose are in critical condition right now. The senior council is here. They're furious. The data's a mess."

I hold the phone a little farther from my ear and let the chaos wash over me instead of through me. Somewhere in the background I hear Ines's voice pitch up into something close to a wail, and Adrian snapping at her in a low, vicious hiss that isn't meant for the phone but reaches it anyway. A council member's voice cuts through everything else, flat and furious, demanding to know how a treatment this far along produced results this catastrophic.

I could tell them. I could tell all of them, right now, that the woman they trusted with warriors' lives has never developed a working formula in hers, that every version she's ever touched was built to fail from the moment she stole the notes she didn't understand. I don't. Not yet. Some satisfactions are worth letting ripen.

"I can fix it," I say, because I can, because it was always going to come back to me the second her fraud collapsed. "But the lab at the office is too cramped. I need my own space if you want this done right."

"Whatever you need," Adrian says, too fast, the way a drowning man agrees to anything holding a rope. "Just fix it."

"Fifty million," I say. "For the lab. Today."

A pause. I can hear him doing the math, weighing his pride against the wreck currently screaming in front of a council that's one bad report away from stripping his candidacy entirely.

"Fine," he grits out. "Fine. It's done."

Behind him Ines shrieks something about the money, about how that's supposed to be for her research, and I hear Adrian's voice drop into a register I recognize — the one he used to use on me, right before I learned what it actually meant.

"Shut up," he snaps at her. "You already cost me enough today."

My account buzzes a second later. Fifty million, landed clean. Exactly what I need to close on the mansion outright and still have enough left for the medicine I'll need to start growing before winter.

I hang up without saying goodbye. It doesn't even occur to me that I should have.

*

The hospital rises up ahead of us, white stone against a darkening sky, more heavily guarded than anywhere I've seen since I woke up in this life. Gamma warriors flank the entrance in pairs, checking credentials even from wolves in Moonlight colors. Nurses move fast through the front doors, heads down, the kind of pace that only happens when someone important is running out of time.

Silas leans forward and taps the driver's shoulder.

"We're here," he says, and then, quieter, meant only for me, "He's been asking for you. Every day. Before he even knew you were alive to ask for."

My chest tightens in a way that has nothing to do with Adrian, or Ines, or any of the wreckage I just walked away from on the phone. I spent eighteen years believing I came from nowhere, that nobody had ever wanted me enough to look. Somewhere on the top floor of this building is a man who spent those same eighteen years refusing to believe I was gone.

The car stops. Silas opens the door and offers his hand, and for the first time since I opened my eyes a year in the past, I feel something other than rage sitting in my chest, something I haven't let myself feel in longer than I can remember. It scares me more than Freya's claws did.

I step out into the cold and follow him inside, past the guards, past the nurses, toward whatever's waiting fo

r me on the other side of those doors.