The envoy is not Jericho. I clock that before the man dismounts—too short, too broad, moving with the efficient caution of someone carrying someone else's words. Jericho sent a messenger instead of himself, and the restraint of that choice tells me more than any terms on paper could.
"Luna Agatha." The envoy dips his head with rehearsed formality. "Alpha Aldrowen extends terms for a formal peace accord between Stormhowl and Moonveil."
"He extends terms." Vesper's voice arrives from the doorway behind me, and the temperature in the room drops three degrees. "How generous of the man who spent weeks hammering my walls."
The envoy produces a scroll sealed in dark wax and does not flinch, which earns him a grudging point. Vesper takes it, breaks the seal, and reads with the focused intensity of a man looking for the trap he already assumes is there. I watch his eyes move down the page—steady, steady, then stopping.
"No." He sets the scroll on the table like placing a weapon down. "Absolutely not."
"Which part?" I reach for the scroll and his hand lands on it first. Our fingers don't touch, but the six inches of oak between them hum with something territorial. I hold his gaze until he lifts his palm, and I pull the parchment toward me.
The terms are clean—border agreements, trade provisions, ceasefire formalized. Then I reach the fourth clause and my pulse kicks sideways.
A wolf of confirmed rival bloodline residing in a foreign pack shall be granted a period of return to their birth pack, not less than two lunar cycles, as decreed under the Covenant of Origin.
Two months at Stormhowl. The old law is cited with who spent weeks in an archive being coached by a very patient elder—I can practically smell the age in the phrasing.
"The Covenant of Origin hasn't been invoked in seventy years." Vesper's arms fold across his chest, every line of him broadcasting refusal. "It's archaic."
"It's binding." Ronan speaks from the corner where he's been reading over my shoulder, his voice carrying the careful weight of a Beta who knows the law better than his brother wants him to. "If we refuse a lawful provision, the entire treaty collapses. Publicly."
"Then let it collapse." Vesper's jaw locks hard enough that the scar along its edge goes white. "She's not leaving this compound."
"She is standing right here." I set the scroll down and meet his eyes. "And she can read."
"You're not going to Stormhowl for two months, Agatha." He says it the way he says everything that matters—flat, final, a door being nailed shut from the inside. "That's the end of it."
"If you reject this clause, you reject the treaty. If you reject the treaty, the ceasefire dies." I keep my voice level and my hands still on the table. "How many wolves can you afford to lose in the next siege, Vesper? Because Jericho knows that number better than you do."
His nostrils flare. The calculation runs behind his eyes—visible, mechanical, a man who processes people as variables and hates when the math doesn't cooperate.
"Fine." The word comes through his teeth like it's being extracted without anesthesia. "Two months. But the boy stays."
My fingers curl against the oak hard enough to feel the grain. "Nico is three weeks old, Vesper. He's nursing."
"He is my son and my heir, and he remains in Moonveil." The softened version of Vesper—the man who traced Nico's hairline and made sounds too quiet to carry—is gone. In his place stands the alpha who calculates custody the way he calculates territory: possession first, sentiment never.
"You can't—he needs me. He's an infant, Vesper, not a chess piece you park on a square until I come back—"
"He stays." No crack, no hesitation. His palm hits the table once and the scroll jumps. "My pack, my heir, my condition. Take it or the treaty dies on your side instead of mine."
The two versions of him exist in the same body and neither one apologizes for the other. The man who held Nico like something holy and the man who just leveraged him like collateral—they share a heartbeat, and the contradiction sits in my chest like a bone that won't set straight.
"Neve can supplement." His voice drops a fraction—not softening, adjusting. "She's already prepared a formula."
"You planned this." My nails leave crescents in the oak. "Before the envoy arrived. You knew these terms were coming and you already had a contingency for removing me from my son."
He doesn't deny it. His silence is its own confession, delivered with the steady gaze of a man who considers preparation a virtue regardless of what it costs someone else.
The envoy stands frozen by the door with the expression of a man who deeply regrets his career choices.
I storm out of there and find Ronan in the corridor afterward, leaning against the wall with his arms folded and his mouth set in the specific line of a man who listened to every word through the door and chose to wait.
"I'll watch him." He says it before I open my mouth—quiet, direct, no preamble. "Personally. Every day. Neve and I will take shifts."
"Ronan—" My voice does something structural that I clamp down on before it reaches my face.
"I'm not asking for your trust, Agatha. I'm telling you what I'm going to do." He holds my gaze with the steady certainty of a man who has spent years disagreeing with his brother in silence. "Nico will be safe. That's not a promise from your Beta. That's a promise from me."
My jaw works around three different responses before settling on the only one that matters. "If anything happens to him—"
"Then you'll have every right to burn this place to the ground, and I'll hand you the match." His mouth almost curves. "Go to Stormhowl. Learn who you are. Come back for your son."
I nod once because my throat has closed around anything more elaborate, and I leave before he sees what's happening behind my eyes.
The guest room. The window. Forty-seven flagstones below, and on the bed behind me the small bag I packed months ago—repacked now with clean clothes, the herbal kit, my mother's comb. Ready like it's been waiting for this.
Nico sleeps in the crib with his fist curled against his cheek, breathing with the total commitment of someone who has no idea the world is rearranging itself around him. His hair is dark and impossibly soft and smells like cedar and warmth and the only thing I have ever been certain about.
I memorize him. The curve of his ear. The crease where his wrist meets his palm. The way his bottom lip pushes forward when he dreams, exactly like his father's jaw when he's deciding something—and the thought of that resemblance cracks something I've been holding together with both hands.
Two months. Sixty days without this weight against my chest, without the small furious sounds he makes at dawn, without pressing my mouth to the top of his head and finding the only scent in this compound that means home.
The bag sits on the bed behind me. My son sleeps in front of me. Between the two, every version of who I've been and who I'm becoming balances on a distance I haven't learned how to survive yet.