(Rhea POV)

This is what Declan Ashford woke up to on the morning his world ended: an empty room, an open door, and tracks heading south.

I know because I made it my business to know. Information is the only currency rogues have that packs respect, and I'd spent four years building a network that could tell me what an Alpha ate for breakfast three territories away. So when Declan's household erupted at dawn — maids screaming, guards scrambling, Vera standing in the doorway of her special basement room with a face like carved ice — I had the details within six hours.

Lily's bed was empty. The window was open. The silver collar was on the floor — she'd worked the clasp somehow, or it had been loose, or she'd borne enough pain to force it over her head. I preferred not to think about that last possibility for too long.

The tracks were small. Bare feet in soft earth, heading south through the gardens, past the boundary wall where the sentry coverage was thinnest, and into the forest. South. Toward the wild land. Toward rogue territory.

Toward me, though she hadn't known that. A five-year-old running blind into wilderness because the wilderness was less frightening than what was behind her. I tried not to calculate how many nights she'd slept outside, how many meals she'd missed, how her bare feet had looked on the frozen ground. I tried, and I failed.

Declan sent ten elite trackers within the hour. His best. Wolves trained to hunt, flush, and retrieve — the same wolves, I assumed, who'd been part of the escort that dragged me out of Silverpine six years ago. I wondered if any of them remembered the sound I'd made. I wondered if they'd felt proud.

They made it sixteen miles past the boundary stones before my patrols intercepted them. Ten elite trackers versus seven of my perimeter wolves — and mine were fighting on home ground, in terrain they knew like their own bodies, with the cold fury of people who'd all been thrown away by packs exactly like Silverpine.

Nine of the ten got turned around at the treeline. Bruised but breathing — I'm not wasteful.

Torren brought me the report while the last tracker was still being held. "One of them recognized your name," he said. "When our wolves said who they served. His face went gray."

"Good."

"He asked if you were really Rhea Voss. I told him he could go back to Silverpine and find out."

The tenth I kept for two hours.

Not to hurt. I don't do that — it's a line, and the day I cross it, I become the thing I'm fighting against. I kept him for two hours because I needed him to carry something back, and I needed him scared enough to deliver it directly to Declan, not to Vera, not to a beta, not to anyone with the authority to intercept it.

I gave him a folded piece of paper and told him to put it in Declan's hand and nobody else's. Then I let him go.

Three words and a signature.

She has my eyes. — R

I know the exact moment it hit him.

My contact inside Silverpine — a kitchen maid who'd been kind to me when I was Luna, the only one who'd spoken to me on the night I was dragged out — she told me later. The tracker came to Declan's study. Handed over the note. Declan unfolded it, read it, and went white. Not pale. Not blanched. White. The color of a man watching the ground open beneath his feet.

R. There was only one R in Declan Ashford's past, and he'd told the world she was gone. Not dead — he'd been careful about that, careful enough to leave himself deniability. He'd said I was exiled. Disgraced. A footnote. And for the first two years, that was true — I was a pregnant exile dying by inches in the wild, and if I'd disappeared, nobody would have noticed.

But I hadn't disappeared. I'd survived. And then I'd done something worse than survive — I'd built something. A territory. A compound. A pack-without-a-pack that had grown from a campfire and one loyal beta to three hundred wolves and a reputation that had reached the Council of Packs two years ago.