The enforcers are halfway to the holding facility when Lia stops walking.
She doesn't struggle—just plants her feet and refuses to move. The enforcers wait, because the Luna hasn't ordered force.
"One more thing," Lia turns, and the smile on her face stops the blood in my veins. Not defeated, but triumphant. "You think I was working for hunters?"
She laughs, and the sound is wrong—wild and high, the noise of a mind that's been planning destruction so long it's become indistinguishable from joy.
"The Montgomery clan was a convenient tool, my dear sis. Useful foot soldiers with good weapons and a grudge I could exploit. But they weren't the ones who approached me first."
"What are you talking about?" My voice comes out sharper than I intend. "You confessed—"
"To using the hunter network, yeah." She shakes off the enforcers' grip and faces the assembled pack.
"But guess what? Vampires came to me in exile and offered me revenge and power and everything this pack decided I didn't deserve. All they wanted in return was information."
"That's impossible," Marcus says from the crowd. "Vampires haven't engaged with wolf territories in living memory. The truce—"
"The truce was convenience, not principle. They avoided you because you weren't worth the effort." Lia's smile widens. "But Silvermoon has something they want now—”
She turns to my cubs.
“Three children with unprecedented abilities! Now, when your Alpha’s wolf is gone, and a pack is weakened by weeks of assault that I orchestrated… They’ll come!"
"She's lying," Garrett's voice, angry and desperate. "This is manipulation—she's trying to create panic—"
"Am I? Then explain the surveillance your sentries have been reporting at the northern boundary. Pale figures watching from the treeline. Scouts who vanish before your wolves can reach them."
She looks directly at me.
"You've seen them, Thalia, don’t you? You know what's been watching you. You just didn't want to believe it."
The northern boundary sightings. Reports I filed as unconfirmed, pushed to the bottom of the priority list because we were too busy fighting hunters to investigate shadows.
"Why would vampires partner with a disgraced wolf?" Lysander steps forward. "What do you offer them that they couldn't obtain themselves?"
"Institutional knowledge. Vampires gather intelligence for decades before striking. I compressed that timeline from years to months."
Pride saturates her voice. "Every piece of information I fed the hunters also went to the vampire council."
"You sold us to two enemies simultaneously," I say, and the calm in my voice frightens me more than her revelation.
"Only to the one that mattered. The hunters were camouflage—to occupy your attention while the real danger positioned itself."
She steps toward me.
"The vampires have their own surveillance, Thalia. They supplemented what I gave them with capabilities your wolves can't detect."
"How do we know any of this is true?" Caroline cuts through the chaos. "You've lied about everything else."
"Oh, look who’s here! Isn’t that a hunter’s daughter speaking?" Lia's smile doesn't waver. "Call your sentries at the northern perimeter. Ask what they've seen in the last forty-eight hours."
She grins:
"Better yet, ask little Luna what she feels when she reaches toward the treeline at night—the ancient, cold hunger she can't identify because she's never encountered anything that old."
My stomach drops. Luna's complaints about strange emotional signatures. The nighttime episodes where she'd wake screaming about something cold and patient.
I'd attributed it to trauma. I'd held her through those episodes and told her the shields would get stronger, that the strange feelings were just her expanding abilities adjusting to the world.
I'd been wrong, and my daughter had been sensing something ancient pressing against her mind for weeks while I dismissed her terror as growing pains.
"You see it now," Lia reads my face with a sister's precision. "Your empath daughter has been feeling them for weeks, and you dismissed it as growing pains."
"Enough!" Kieran's voice from his chair. "You've delivered your message."
"I wanted you to understand that while you are playing noble games of mercy—" she gestures at me "—the real threat was studying every move you made. The vampire council doesn't attack until they're certain. Thanks to me, they are."
"Take her," I tell the enforcers. "Now."
They drag her toward the holding facility, and she goes without resistance, the performance complete. Her laughter carries across the compound—that wrong, wild sound—growing fainter but never quite disappearing.
"Is it true?" Marcus asks into the silence. "About the vampires?"
"The northern boundary sightings are documented," Lysander confirms. "I flagged them three weeks ago."
"And Luna's episodes?" Caroline looks at me.
"She described them as old and cold and hungry. I thought she was processing trauma." My throat closes. "I should have listened."
"None of us expected vampires," Kieran grips his chair. "They haven't openly moved against wolves in centuries."
"The truce assumed both sides maintained strength," Lysander's voice goes grim. "Lia showed them a wounded pack. We stopped looking like an equal."
"So what do we do?" Garrett asks, hostility transformed into focused aggression.
"We deal with the hunters first," I straighten my spine. "Caroline's intelligence lets us neutralize the Montgomery operation. Once we've eliminated the conventional threat, we address the supernatural one."
"And if they don't wait for us to finish with the hunters?" Marcus presses.
"Then we fight on two fronts and pray that centuries of avoiding wolves left them rusty."
Nobody laughs. The weight of what we're facing settles across the clearing like frost.
The clearing empties with shell-shocked efficiency.
Hunters were frightening but comprehensible—humans with weapons. Vampires are something else: ancient, patient, powerful in ways wolves barely understand.
The pack isn't just fighting a war anymore. They've been positioned as prey for something older than Silvermoon itself, and the woman who arranged it is settling into her cell with a smile that says she's already won.
I stand in the empty clearing, torches guttering, and feel the weight of an invisible threat pressing against everything I've built. Somewhere in the dark treeline, ancient eyes are watching.
And thanks to my sister, they know exactly where to find us.