"The texts say 'the Firstborn lines were ended.' Whether that means killed, bred out, or something else — I don't know. But the result was the same. The Firstborn disappeared. Council took over. And for however long it's been since then, every wolf in the world has lived inside a system that was designed to make sure no Firstborn ever emerged again."

Silence. The lantern flame was steady now. My hands were not.

"You're saying my daughter—"

"I'm saying Aldric has spent his career in those archives. He knows more about the Firstborn than anyone alive. And when he saw 99.97 percent and heard about a wolf that woke at eight months and doesn't obey pack hierarchy and can freeze trained soldiers with a fear command—" He stopped. "He recognized what he was looking at."

"What is he looking at?"

"Something he's spent his entire life making sure doesn't come back."

I stood in the command room. The map on the table. The lantern. The man who'd given up everything sitting across from me, telling me that my daughter carried something in her blood that had been erased from history because it was too dangerous to exist.

Not too dangerous for the world. Too dangerous for the people who ran it.

"Is that why they want her?" I said. "To study her? To contain her?"

"I don't know what Aldric's specific plan is. The texts don't say what happened to the last Firstborn. They just say the lines were ended." His voice was careful. "But I know that a man who has spent thirty years maintaining the system that replaced the Firstborn is not going to look at a six-year-old who might bring it back and think this is fine."

I walked to the door of the safe room. Opened it. Lily was asleep on the cot — small, curled around the wooden wolf, her wrists still showing the faded silver marks from the years in Declan's house. The scars that had almost healed. The scars that she'd carry anyway, because some things heal on the surface and stay underneath.

A six-year-old. A child who asked if she'd done something bad when her wolf protected her. Who tolerated reading lessons because the healer bribed her with dried fruit. Who slept with a wooden wolf that an old omega had carved for her because she'd asked for a friend she could carry.

And inside her — something old enough to scare a Council elder. Something powerful enough to freeze soldiers and turn eyes silver and reach across every hierarchy that the wolf world had built to keep itself in order.

She wasn't a weapon. She wasn't a bloodline. She was my daughter.

I closed the door. Looked at Kieran.

"No one touches her," I said. "Not Council. Not Aldric. No one."

"I know."

"You don't know. Because you didn't spend a year watching them put silver on her skin and lock her in a room to make her wolf smaller. You didn't carry her out of that house with her wrists burned and her eyes shut because she'd learned that closing them made it hurt less."

My voice broke on the last word. Not loudly — the way a branch breaks under sustained weight. A quiet sound that means something structural has given way.

"They will not touch her again. If I have to tear down every wall Council ever built, they will not touch my daughter again."

Kieran looked at me. The man who'd given up his title, his rank, his entire world. Who'd walked across a battlefield because his wolf had chosen the woman standing in front of him. He looked at me with an expression that wasn't pity and wasn't sympathy and wasn't the careful professional composure he'd worn for nineteen days.

It was recognition. The look of a wolf who has seen what his mate will do to protect their young and understands that the force he's looking at is larger than anything he's ever commanded.

"I know," he said. And this time, he meant it.