0138: Proven Or Nothing

Alice's POV"That was fast. You didn't even give it a second thought," he countered."It doesn't need to be slow." I sat up against the headboard. "Think about what it looks like. An open investigation, a dead child, half this pack already certain I did it — and the doctor packs a bag in the dark and slips out the gate. What's the first thing Marcus says at the next council? What's the first thing every wolf in that market says over breakfast?"He didn't answer, because he knew."It looks like running, and running looks like guilt, and I'd be handing them the verdict wrapped in a cloth on my way past that gate. Everything Benjamin's doing to clear my name, everything John's been building in that clinic — I'd undo all of it in one night. So no. I'm not leaving Blue Moon until my name's clean. Not for Damian, not for you, not even to be safe. When I go through that gate I'll go through it in daylight, proven innocent, with nothing behind me. Or I don't go at all."There was a silence —

0139: A Mother's Fury

LISA’S POVI wore black because I couldn't picture myself in anything else. The dress had been hanging in my closet for six years, bought for an elder's funeral I'd barely sat through, worn once, and then forgotten.It still fit. The mirror gave me back a woman with cold flat eyes and her hair pulled too tight, and what caught me wasn't that I looked like a widow. It was that I'd had the right dress in there the whole time, waiting years without either of us knowing what for.Lily's room was just as she'd left it. I'd made the bed myself the morning before she died, grumbling about it the way I grumbled every morning, and it was still made, and it would stay made now.Her stuffed bunny sat on the pillow. Her drawings covered most of one wall. On the desk, the blue wolf she'd been making for Alice lay half-finished, half a tail, because she'd run out of afternoon and said tomorrow about it the way children say tomorrow about everything.I straightened one of her dolls that didn't need s

0140: Weaponized Grief

LISA'S POVAldric was looking at his hands. Sorin's face did something and then stopped doing it."I've heard the healer's findings," I went on, "and I want to say plainly that I don't dispute a word of them. I'm not a doctor. I won't stand here and argue with a man who's better at his work than I am at mine." I let that settle — a woman who concedes is a woman who gets believed on the next thing."I only want to understand them. That dose was measured to a grown woman's weight, we're told. Measured carefully. Measured by somebody who knew that weight well enough to get it right the first time." I turned, slowly, so the whole room came past me. "I've been trying all morning to think who in this territory would know a woman's weight that precisely, and the honest answer is that I couldn't think of anyone at all, except the woman herself."Nobody said anything. Somewhere near the back, a chair moved."I'm not accusing anyone." I said it into the silence and meant it heard exactly as it w

0141: Far Too Much

ALICE'S POVHe came at dusk with the council record under his arm, which meant they'd finished hours ago and somebody had spent the whole afternoon arguing about whether I was allowed to read it."You're entitled to it," Callum said. "Anybody under confinement gets the record of a session where their name comes up. Old rule. Nobody's pulled it in thirty years.""Whose idea was it to pull it now?""Mine. The Alpha signed it without reading past the first line, which I'd call permission."The guard on my step had drifted back far enough to give us the look of privacy. Moths had found the porch light already. One kept going at the glass, again and again, the same small dry sound."Is it bad?"Callum took his time with that. Longer than I wanted. "It's well done. Which is worse."Somebody had copied the whole thing out in small tight handwriting, the elders' names down the margin, and here and there a square bracket where he'd set down something that wasn't speech.Sorin read John's findi

0142: They All Turned Away

Lisa's POVI came back from the chamber knowing two things. The whole room believed now that somebody had tried to kill Alice Watson. And my daughter was still lying under a sheet in that building, twelve days on, while they went round and round working out who the real victim was.Cole was sitting on my step with a fistful of wildflowers held down along his leg, the little purple and white ones that grow up through the training yard fence. The ones Lily used to bring home with the roots still hanging off them and half the dirt down her front."I'm sorry I couldn't come sooner," he said. "I was away from the territory. I only heard when I got back.""You're here now. That's more than most of them managed."He followed me inside without being asked. There was a jar under the sink in the kitchen and I filled it and put the flowers in it and set it on the windowsill where the light would find them in the morning. A notice from the water office had been leaning against the salt shaker fo

0143: You Failed Her Once

BENJAMIN'S POVCallum came to my office door at first light instead of my bedroom, and that told me they'd already assembled without sending for me."All of them?""All of them. Sorin's chairing. They've been in there since before the bell.""Then they've voted.""They've decided. The vote's for your benefit."There was a man up a ladder in the hallway changing a bulb that had been dead since before any of this started, and I had to stand there while he shifted it to let me past. He apologized twice. Something in how I told him it was fine made him apologize a third time.We walked. Callum kept his voice low beside me. "Half this pack thinks she poisoned that child. The other half thinks somebody tried to poison her and missed. Nobody's slept properly in a week. Whatever comes out of that room, they need to see process.""They'll come round the day I put somebody in front of them in handcuffs. That's all any of this is. People want a name, and when they get one they'll forget every wo