TASTE OF POWER

Chapter 3

Silas doesn't make me wait long for the rest of it.

"Your father is alive," he says. "Alpha Corwin. But he's dying, and he doesn't have much time left. I didn't want you walking in here without knowing that first."

I sit down on the edge of my bed because my legs stop trusting themselves. A father. Alive. Dying. Three words that shouldn't fit in the same sentence and somehow do.

"How long has he known about me?" I ask, and my voice comes out smaller than I want it to.

"Since the attack," Silas says. "He never stopped looking. He hired trackers in every territory for eighteen years. We only found you because a blood registry flagged your name last month."

Eighteen years. Every single one of them spent believing I was unwanted, and the whole time there was a man out there paying strangers to find a little girl in a photograph.

"I'll come as soon as I can," I tell him, and I mean it more than I've meant anything in longer than I can remember.

I hang up and sit there with the photo of the gap-toothed little girl still open on my screen, tracing her face with my thumb like I can will myself back into that memory. Nothing comes. Just the ache of a childhood I don't get to have twice.

*

Downstairs, the air already feels wrong before I round the corner.

Adrian's at the kitchen island, Ines pressed against his side like she grew there, her fingers walking up his forearm while she talks. I catch the tail end of it — some breakthrough, some miracle compound she claims will suppress the silver poison symptoms long enough for the council to sign off early.

"She wants to run point on the research," Adrian says when he sees me, like he's bracing for a fight. He straightens up, puts half a step of distance between himself and Ines, an old reflex from a marriage he's already decided is temporary.

I don't give him a fight. "Good idea. Let her take it."

His eyebrows go up. He was ready for tears, for accusations, for the version of me that begs him to notice her. I watch him recalibrate in real time, trying to figure out what changed. Ines isn't nearly as good at hiding her reaction — her smile flickers, uncertain, like she expected to have to fight harder for this and doesn't know what to do with an easy win.

"You've been carrying this alone too long," I say, already turning toward the stairs. "I need a few days off anyway."

"Vera—"

I don't stop walking. Let him sit with that. Let him wonder what I know that he doesn't. Behind me I hear Ines whisper something too low to catch, and Adrian doesn't answer her either.

*

Micah's waiting outside my door with a glass of milk, steam still curling off the top, his face arranged into something soft and sorry.

"I shouldn't have yelled at you," he says. "I made this myself. Please drink it."

Last life, I drank a hundred cups just like this one. I remember how tired I got afterward, how my hands started shaking around month three, how the doctors called it stress and overwork and I believed them because why would my own son do this to me. I remember thanking him for making it. I remember meaning it.

"Put it on the desk," I say. "I'll drink it after I shower."

Something flickers behind his eyes, gone before I can name it. He does what I ask, lingers a second too long watching to see if I'll take a sip in front of him, then reminds me Adrian wants to talk to me and leaves.

The second the door clicks shut, I call for Nora.

My Delta appears within a minute, quiet and quick as always, and I hand her the glass without a word of explanation beyond, "Get this tested. Tonight. Tell no one."

She doesn't ask questions. That's why I trust her. She wraps the glass in a cloth like it's evidence, because it is, and disappears down the back stairs before Micah's even made it to the end of the hallway.

*

The house at the Silver Moon border is even better than I remembered — stone walls, a garden plot already turned for planting, far enough from Adrian's compound that I could scream at the top of my lungs and no one there would hear it. I want it. I need somewhere that isn't soaked in four years of lies.

The Valley Wolf auction house sits at the center of a market street thick with the smell of crushed herbs and old money. Vendors call out prices on moonflower stems and silver-lined blades, buyers in fine coats moving between them like the whole street belongs to them. I walk up to the entrance with the deed already half-imagined in my hands, and a guard steps directly into my path before I clear the doorway.

He tips his head back and breathes in, slow and deliberate, the way wolves do when they're reading your rank off your scent.

"Omega," he says, curling the word like something spoiled. "This isn't your kind of event. Turn around."

"I'm here to bid," I say. "Let me through."

"Omegas don't bid. Omegas don't own. Get lost before I make you."

A laugh cuts across the street before I can answer him. A she-wolf peels off from a cluster of guests, sharp-eyed, dressed in Red Moon colors, clearly enjoying this more than she should. I've seen her before, once, trailing behind her father at a feast Adrian dragged me to years ago — close enough to recognize, far enough that she never once looked in my direction back then.

"Did she just say she's here to bid?" She looks me up and down like I'm something tracked in on someone's boot. "I'm Freya. Daughter of the Red Moon Alpha. And you are absolutely nobody."

"I'm the Moonlight heir," I say, flat, because I'm done performing humility for people who wouldn't recognize it as a gift even if I handed it to them gift-wrapped.

Freya laughs harder, loud enough that a few heads nearby turn to watch. "Moonlight doesn't have an heir. Alpha Corwin never had a daughter — everyone knows that. Claiming his bloodline is a crime, sweetheart. I could have you dragged in front of the council for less."

The guard beside her smirks like she's already won something. I feel the old instinct rise in my chest, the one that used to make me apologize for taking up space, and I let it pass through me and out the other side without stopping.

I don't answer Freya. I take out my phone and dial Silas instead, calm, unbothered, because arguing with her would mean admitting she's worth the air it takes.

That's apparently the wrong move. Freya's face goes tight with fury at being ignored, and before I can lift the phone to my ear, her hand cracks across my cheek.

The sound of it snaps through the crowded street loud enough that conversations around us stop cold. Somewhere behind me a vendor drops a crate of glass jars, and nobody so much as glances at the mess.

My face stings, heat blooming fast under the skin, and for half a second the old me — the one who spent four years swallowing insults to keep the peace — nearly apologizes for existing in Freya's line of sight.

Then I remember I already died once for being too quiet.

I lower the phone, slow, and look at her, and I don't bother raising my voice, because the whole street has already gone silent enough to hear a whisper.

"You'll want to remember that hand," I say. "You're about to lose the use of it."

Freya's eyes flash gold, her shape already breaking down the seams of her human skin, claws sliding out where fingers used to be, and the crowd around us scrambles backward to give her room to strike. The guard who wouldn't let me through the door doesn't move to stop her. Nobody moves to stop her. As far as this street is concerned, an Omega getting torn apart in the open air is simply the natural order of things, and not one of them plans to interrupt it.

I don't have a wolf to shift into. I don't have claws, or fangs, or the speed that would let me put real distance between us before she closes it. What I have is four years of combat drills nobody thought I needed, done alone in an empty gym long after everyone else had gone home, because being an Omega in that house meant learning early that no one was coming to save me.

Freya's weight shifts forward onto the balls of her feet.

I plant mine and wait for her to close the last few steps between us.