I'd thought it was the pain. I'd thought labor was supposed to feel like drowning. No one had told me otherwise, because no one had been honest with me about anything that night.

"The delivery was normal," Elara continued. "The baby was healthy. Full-term. She cried immediately — strong lungs, good color. I put her on Rhea's chest."

She stopped. Her hands tightened on each other.

"Rhea was fading in and out. She touched the baby's face. She said something — I couldn't hear all of it. Something about eyes. The baby had her eyes."

My throat was closed. I didn't move. Didn't shift, didn't breathe differently. I let Elara talk because this was her testimony and she needed to give it and I needed to hear it, all of it, every word.

"Then Vera took the baby. She said she needed to clean her, weigh her. Standard things. I let her take the baby. I was monitoring Rhea — her blood pressure was dropping. I focused on the mother."

"How long was Vera out of the room?"

"Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. When she came back, she was alone." Elara's voice went flat. The same flat Lily used when she talked about the special room. The tone people use when the only way to say something is to strip every feeling out of it and deliver the words like stones. "Vera told me the baby had no heartbeat. She said it happened during the cleaning — sudden, unexplained. She said the baby was gone."

"Did you examine the baby?"

"I asked to. Vera said the body had already been taken for burial preparation. She said there was nothing to examine."

"Did you believe her?"

Silence. Five seconds. Ten.

"No." Elara's voice cracked on the word. The first break. "No. That baby was healthy. She cried. She was pink and breathing and perfect. Babies don't die silently in ten minutes with no warning signs. I knew something was wrong. I knew it in my body before I knew it in my head."

"What happened next?"

"Vera pulled me aside. She said, 'The baby is dead. You will tell Rhea the baby had no heartbeat. You will not ask questions. You will be compensated.' I said I wouldn't. I said I needed to see the body. I needed to file a report."

She looked at her hands. "Vera said, 'If you refuse, I will tell the Alpha you administered the wrong herbs during delivery and caused the death. Your word against mine. And the Alpha will believe his mother.'"

My fingernails were digging into my palms. I could feel the pressure but not the pain — the pain was somewhere else, somewhere deeper, in the part of me that remembered waking up in a haze and being told my baby was dead and believing it because I had no reason not to.

"So you told Rhea the baby had died," Kieran said.

"I told Rhea the baby had no heartbeat." Elara's eyes were wet but she didn't wipe them. "I stood in that room, looking at a woman who was half-conscious from whatever Vera had drugged her with, and I told her that her baby was dead. And then I went home and I packed a bag and I left Silverpine that night and I never went back."

"What happened to the baby?"

"Vera gave her to Petra. I learned that later — through whispers, through the network of wolves who leave packs and carry stories with them. The baby was alive. The baby was always alive."

Kieran looked at me. A brief, careful look — checking. Not checking if I was okay. Checking if I was still here, still present, still holding the shape of myself together in a room where someone was peeling back the lid on six years of buried truth.

I was here. I was present. I wasn't going to leave this room until every word was recorded.

"Two days after the birth," Elara continued without being prompted, "Rhea was exiled. I heard about it from a contact. Midnight exile. No hearing. No appeal. Vera had arranged it — told the pack Rhea was unstable, dangerous, a threat to the bloodline. The pack believed her because Vera had spent twenty years building the kind of authority that people don't question."