(Rhea POV)

I didn't leave.

I sat in a folding chair beside Lily's cot and I didn't leave. Isla checked on us every hour, changed the bandages once, left water and broth. The compound woke up around us — footsteps, voices, the clang of the training yard — and I sat there, watching a five-year-old girl breathe, counting the seconds between each exhale like they were something I could lose.

She woke up at mid-morning. Blinked at the canvas ceiling. Turned her head and found me still there, and something happened in her expression that I will never be able to describe to anyone and never need to, because it was mine.

Surprise. That I'd stayed. "Hi," I said.

"Hi." She pulled the blanket tighter. "Is this your house?"

"Kind of. It's a camp. A lot of people live here."

"Are they... rogues?" She whispered the word the way pack children were taught to. Like something dirty.

"Yes. So am I."

Lily processed this. "Grandmother says rogues eat children."

"Your grandmother says a lot of things that aren't true."

That landed somewhere real. Lily's eyes dropped to her bandaged wrists, and I watched her turn something over in her head — a child recalibrating, testing a new idea against an old one. If the lady in the rogue camp was kind, and Grandmother said rogues were monsters, then maybe Grandmother was wrong about other things too.

"Are you hungry?" I asked.

She was. I gave her broth first — her stomach would be shrunken from the journey — and she drank it in small, careful sips, holding the cup with both hands. The bandages made her grip clumsy. She didn't complain. She didn't spill a drop, either. That kind of care around food — the kind that comes from meals being conditional, from learning early that wasting anything invites consequences.

I watched her drink and filed it away with everything else I was collecting. Evidence. I was building a case without realizing it, the same way I'd built this territory — one piece at a time, each one making the picture clearer and uglier.

"Lily, can you tell me about your family?"

She set the cup down. "What about them?"

"Whatever you want. Whatever comes to mind."

It came out in pieces. Not a story — children don't tell stories. They give you moments, out of order, and you build the picture yourself.

Father was quiet. He worked a lot. Sometimes he looked at Lily with a strange expression, like he was seeing someone else. He didn't yell at her, but he didn't hold her either. He existed at a distance, and Lily had learned not to try to close it.

Mother — Petra — was careful. She kissed Lily's forehead at night, but the kiss always felt like something she was remembering to do rather than something she wanted to do. She never called Lily by pet names. She never lost herself in play the way other mothers did. There was a wall there, made of glass — you could see through it but never touch.

"She tries," Lily said, and the generosity of that nearly broke me. Five years old and already making excuses for the woman who'd been given a stolen child and raised her at arm's length.

And then there was Grandmother.

Lily's voice changed when she talked about Vera. Not louder, not softer — flatter. The way you'd describe the weather in a place where it was always cold.

"Grandmother has a special room," Lily said. "In the basement. It's for when the bad thing wants to come out."

"The bad thing?" I kept my voice neutral.

"Inside me. It moves sometimes. Like something pushing under my skin. Grandmother says it's broken and it needs to be fixed."

Her wolf. Lily was describing her wolf trying to emerge. "What happens in the special room?"

Lily's fingers twisted in the blanket. "She puts the things on me. The metal things. On my hands and feet. And the one around my—" She touched her neck. "Then she locks the door and the thing inside goes quiet. It hurts but it goes quiet, so Grandmother says it's working."