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I let out a humorless laugh. “What’s the point? We might not even make it through the week.”

“That’s exactly the point.” She jabbed a finger toward the longhouse. “If this goes badly⁠—”

The door swung open, and lamplight spilled across the frozen ground. Ruby stood in the doorway clutching papers in one hand.

“I found something,” she said. Her voice was steady. Her face wasn’t.

We followed her inside. The longhouse had emptied out. The fire in the hearth had burned low, and the map still lay across the table where she’d left it, weighted at the corners with stones. She set the papers on top of it and smoothed them flat with both hands.

Two files, the Order’s standard issue. The names were printed at the top of each.

Mays, Tomas.

Mays, Marianna.

At the bottom of each page, beneath the record of service, three words were written in a narrow, looping hand.

Not yet settled.

I knew that handwriting. So did Ruby. She’d spent her childhood copying it.

“These are my parents,” she said, voice edging upward at the end. “They were killed, Conan.” She pressed her fingertip beneath her father’s name. “Killed by wolves. That’s what my grandmother told me.” She tilted her head and studied me, her gray eyes searching my face. “Were they?”

I watched her standing there, holding herself so rigidly that one wrong word might shatter her. Raw pain rolled off her and settled in my chest, tightening around my lungs. I would have given anything to take it from her. To go back eighteen years and stand between that little girl and the woman who raised her.

But she deserved the truth.

“No,” I said.

Imogene stepped up to the table. “I’ve kept the ledger for this pack for twenty years. Every death, on both sides.” She shook her head slowly. “I would have known if we’d killed a Mays.”

Ruby turned away from us. Her breath came sharp and shallow, and she curled her hands at her sides.

“The same words,” she whispered. “She must have turned on them. The same way she turned on me.”

Across the table, Imogene caught my eye. Her voice slipped into my mind through the pack bond, low and insistent. Tell her what she is to you.

Absolutely not. I held her gaze. Not while she’s hurting like this.

She’s been lied to enough.

And she’s already going through enough.

Conan, she insisted.

No.

Imogene’s jaw tightened. For a moment I thought she’d argue it out loud, right there in front of Ruby. Then she exhaled through her nose, gave me one last look that promised this conversation wasn’t finished, and walked out. The door closed softly behind her.

The fire popped in the silence.

Ruby turned back to face me. Her eyes were bright, and she pinned them on me. I saw the pain in them, raw and deep. But beneath it, something harder had begun to take shape. Something that looked a great deal like resolve.

“She lied to me my entire life,” she said. “Stoked my anger against shifters so I’d be molded to kill them.”

My hand lifted to soothe her, where words would not.

But she’d already stepped away. “And now that I’m no longer useful to her, she’s getting rid of me.”