"What's your name?"

"Lily."

I'd never chosen a name. They told me my baby was dead before I'd held her. Before I'd touched her. Before I'd had the chance to call her anything at all.

Someone had named her Lily, and it wasn't me.

"Lily," I said, and my voice held. Barely. "Can I look at your arms? I want to make sure Isla — that's our healer — I want to make sure she got everything clean."

Lily hesitated. Then she pulled her hands out from under the blanket and held them toward me, wrists up, the way you'd show someone a wound you were ashamed of.

The bandages were careful — Isla's work. I unwrapped the left one gently. Underneath: a perfect circle of raw, weeping skin. Blistered at the edges, angry red at the center. Silver burn. The kind that comes from prolonged contact, not a brief touch. This had been worn. Repeatedly.

I rewrapped it. My hands were surgeon-steady. I'd unwrapped worse on adults who came to me from abusive packs — broken bones, claw marks, the chemical burns some Alphas used as punishment. But those adults had been grown wolves who'd fought back or at least understood what was happening to them. This was a child who thought the silver was medicine.

I checked the right wrist. Same. "Can I see your ankles?"

She nodded. Same marks — circles, shackle-width.

"Lily." I kept my voice even. The effort it took was something I'd think about later, alone, when I could afford it. "Can I look at your neck?"

She went still. Not the stillness of a child deciding — the stillness of a child bracing.

"The lady said it has to stay covered," she whispered. "Grandmother said if anyone sees it, they'll know I'm broken."

"You're not broken." I said it without thinking. It came out harder than I meant.

"She said the thing inside me is broken. The thing that tries to come out. She said the silver helps."

I reached forward slowly. Lily watched my hands the way prey watches a predator — but she didn't pull away. I eased the collar of her shirt down.

A complete ring. Raw, weeping, infected at the edges. The skin had been burned so many times it had started to scar and then been burned again, the new damage layered over the old. A five-year-old child with a wound that spoke of months. Maybe longer.

A silver collar. Someone had put a silver collar on this girl to suppress her wolf. On my—

My hands were shaking. I put them flat on my thighs so Lily wouldn't see.

"Does it hurt right now?" I asked.

"It always hurts." She said it like weather. Like a fact about the world.

I pulled her shirt back up. I tucked the blanket around her shoulders. I brushed the hair from her face, and she leaned into my hand — just barely, just a fraction — like a plant turning toward light it had never been given enough of.

"You're going to sleep now," I said. "Isla will be right outside. Nobody is going to put silver on you again. Not here. Not ever."

Lily's eyes were already closing. She was asleep in under a minute — the exhaustion of a body that had been running on fear finally letting go.

I stood up. My knees ached — I'd been crouching too long. A stupid, ordinary detail, and I was grateful for it. Ordinary meant my body was still working. Ordinary meant I hadn't shattered.

I walked to the tent entrance. Isla was watching me.

"You saw her face," I said.

Isla nodded. Her eyes were wet. She'd been a healer for thirty years, and in that time she'd seen what packs could do to the wolves they were supposed to protect. But she was looking at Lily's cot with an expression I'd never seen from her before — not professional horror but something rawer, something personal.

"Don't let anyone in except Torren. If she wakes up, she gets anything she wants. Food, water, another blanket, a story — anything."

"Rhea." Isla caught my arm. Her grip was gentle but her voice wasn't. "Those burns are weeks old. Some of them months. Whoever did this — it wasn't once."

"I know."

She let go. I stepped outside. The sky was going gray at the edges, pre-dawn light catching the frost on the compound walls. I could see the watchtower, the training field, the rows of cabins I'd built for three hundred wolves who had nowhere else to go.

My hands were still shaking.

Not from fear.