"We'll figure that out," I said. "Right now, you need to eat more broth."

She ate. I watched. She got broth on the blanket and looked panicked for a second — the quick, darting glance of a child expecting to be scolded. I took the blanket, folded it broth-side in, and handed her a dry one from the shelf. She stared at me like I'd performed a miracle.

It was the blanket that did it. Not the burns, not the collar, not the "fix it forever." The blanket. The flinch over a stain. The absolute shock that someone would fix a small problem without making it into a punishment.

Inside me, something that had been locked behind iron discipline for six years was clawing its way to the surface, and I was going to let it, but not yet. Not in front of her.

I stepped out of the tent at dawn. Actual dawn — the sun cracking the treeline, everything gold and sharp. I'd been in there all night and most of the morning.

Torren was sitting on an ammunition crate ten feet from the entrance. He stood when he saw me.

"She's mine." I said it flat, no preamble. Torren had been with me since the first year, since I was sleeping in a drainage ditch and he was the first rogue who decided I was worth following. He'd watched me build this territory from a campfire and a bad attitude. He'd seen me negotiate with hostile packs, put down challengers, stare down a Council envoy without blinking.

He'd never seen this.

"Declan told me she was born dead." My voice was even. My face was not. I could feel it — something cracking behind my eyes, some architecture of control I'd spent six years constructing. "He lied. He took my daughter and gave her to Petra. And Vera — Vera built a silver room in the basement and put a collar on my child to kill her wolf."

Torren didn't speak. He watched me the way you watch a wire under too much tension — not because you can do anything, but because you need to see the moment it snaps.

"She has my face, Torren. My eyes. My freckles. She's five years old and she has burn scars on her neck from a silver collar, and she calls Petra 'Mother,' and she thinks the wolf inside her is broken because that's what Vera told her."

I stopped. Breathed.

"She held my hand. And she said I felt warm."

Torren's expression didn't change. But something behind it did — something old and hard and patient, the thing that had made him follow a twenty-two-year-old exile into the wild and never once question the decision.

"What do you need?" he asked.

"Call the war council." He nodded once. Turned. Stopped.

"Rhea." Something in his voice made me turn back. "The compound is going to hear about this within the hour. Three hundred wolves, and you know how gossip moves. What do you want them to know?"

I looked back at the tent. Lily was in there. My daughter was in there, sleeping under a wool blanket in a medical tent in a rogue compound, because it was safer than the pack she was born into.

"Tell them the truth," I said. "Tell them Silverpine's Alpha stole my child and his mother tortured her. Tell them their Alpha has a daughter. And tell them we are going to get an answer for every mark on her body."

Torren left. I stood alone in the dawn light, my territory stretching out around me — three hundred wolves, forty square miles, four years of work.

All of it suddenly had a point.