They send a guard to collect me like a parcel. Not Lira, not Neve—a man with a jaw set in the particular configuration of someone who drew the short straw and knows it.
"The Alpha requests your presence in the war room." He delivers this to the wall beside my head. "The inner circle is assembled."
"Requests." I swing my legs off the cot and stand before my knees can register an opinion. "Is that the word he used, or the word you were coached to use so I'd come quietly?"
He doesn't answer, which is its own answer. I follow him through the corridor with my chin level and my hand pressed flat against my stomach beneath the fold of my cloak.
The war room is full. Ronan stands to Vesper's left, arms folded, expression carefully neutral. Six inner circle wolves line the walls like furniture designed to take up space and say nothing.
Hilda occupies the chair nearest the fire with the relaxed posture of a woman who arrived early and wants everyone to know it. And Vesper—standing behind the oak table with both hands flat on the map, looking at me the way he looks at territory he intends to take.
"Sit down, Agatha." He doesn't look up from the map, and the command lands with the flat weight of a man who has already decided how this conversation ends.
"I'll stand." My voice comes out steadier than my pulse. "You didn't summon me here for comfort."
"The elder's prophecy." He walks straight through the front door and kicks it off the hinges—metaphorically, of course. "Two warring bloodlines. Moonveil and whose?"
The room tightens. I can feel it in the shifted weight of every wolf along the walls, the way Ronan's arms tighten across his chest, the small precise click of Hilda's rings against the arm of her chair.
"I don't know what the prophecy means." My nails press half-moons into my palms. "I barely know what a Veilbreaker is—Maren's explanation was not exactly a detailed briefing."
"It means the child carries blood from two rival packs." Vesper's voice is flat and surgical and aimed at my sternum. "Mine and Stormhowl. The same Stormhowl currently putting siege weapons against my walls."
The accusation lands before he says the actual words—I can see it forming in the set of his shoulders, the way his fingers press white against the oak. My stomach drops through the floor.
"You think I slept with a Stormhowl wolf." The words come out thin, disbelieving—the sound of someone being hit from a direction they didn't think to guard.
"I think the prophecy named two bloodlines and one of them is currently trying to breach my eastern wall." He straightens to full height and the room shrinks around him. "So you will explain, in front of witnesses, how that blood ended up in your child."
"By being yours." My voice cracks on the second word and I hate it. "I have never been with anyone but you. In three years—not once, not ever."
"Then explain the prophecy." He cuts through me without flinching. "Two bloodlines. You and me—that's one. Where does the second come from?"
"I don't know." My throat closes around it. "I don't know how prophecies work, I don't know what Maren saw, and I don't know why you're interrogating me instead of asking the woman who spoke the words—"
"Because Maren is still unconscious." Ronan's voice, quiet, from the left. His expression gives me nothing — careful, held, the face of a man standing on a line he hasn't chosen a side of yet.
"Vesper." I plant my feet and hold his gaze because it's the only weapon I have left. "I have been your mate for three years. I ran your household, your rotations, your refugee systems. I stitched a gown for eleven days because I thought you might remember I existed."
My voice goes very quiet. "And your first instinct is that I cheated on you with the enemy?"
Something shifts behind his eyes—a flicker, fast, buried before it reaches his mouth. Then his jaw resets like a door slamming shut.
"The child's parentage will be determined." He straightens, voice flattening into policy—the register he uses when a decision has been made and discussion is over. "Until then—"
"Vesper." Hilda's voice breaks through like glass, and every head in the room turns toward her. She rises from the chair with one hand pressed to her stomach, tears tracking her cheeks like she has practiced in front of a mirror.
"I'm sorry—I didn't want to say anything yet." She crosses to him, and her timing is so immaculate it must have cost her hours. "But after everything, you deserve to know."
She looks up at him like he is the only solid thing in the world. "I'm pregnant. Triplets. Neve confirmed it this morning."
Vesper's entire body changes. His hands leave the table and find her shoulders, and his face does something I have never seen it do in three years of marriage—it opens. Without calculation, without the careful architecture of a man who treats every expression as a tactical decision.
He pulls her close. His forehead drops to hers. His hand cups the back of her head with a tenderness so precise it could cut glass, and every molecule of air in this room rearranges itself around the two of them.
My knees go liquid and I lock them through sheer structural spite. I stand there watching my husband hold another woman the way I spent three years waiting to be held.
Pregnant with triplets. Already. Which means he was sleeping with her before the ceremony—before the white fur, before the naming, before any of it. Every night the bed was cold, it wasn't empty. It was occupied elsewhere.
The tenderness is the worst part. Not the betrayal, not the timeline—the tenderness. The specific gentle way his thumb moves against her hair. Three years I would have killed for that gesture, and she gets it in a war room while I stand six feet away.
"The siege requires my attention." Vesper lifts his head, and the man who just held Hilda like something precious looks at me like something to be managed. "Agatha remains in Moonveil until the child's parentage is confirmed. Ronan, double the eastern rotation."
He walks out. Hilda follows, her hand on his arm. The inner circle files after them with the efficient choreography of people eager to leave a room they never wanted to be in.
I am standing alone in the war room with the ghost of his hand on her hair still playing behind my eyes. The map is still spread across the table, siege positions marked in red, and my fingerprints are still pressed into my own palms like evidence nobody asked for.
Ronan pauses at the door. He looks back—mouth opening around something he decides against. Then he's gone too, and the door closes with the soft, definitive click of a man choosing the wrong side quietly.
The siege drums pulse through the walls. My hand finds my stomach, and the silver scars at my collarbone throb in time with the percussion—like even my broken bond mark is keeping score.