Amalia stood against the cold stone wall of the great hall, hands folded in front of her, while Helena Vale gave orders to the gathered servants.
Torches burned in the iron brackets along the walls, smoke curling up toward the high beams. The rushes underfoot were freshly cut, but the air still held the damp smell of old stone.
"Clear the courtyard by midday," Helena said. "New banners on the east gate. Every torch replaced. The Alpha returns tomorrow, and this hall will not look neglected."
Her gaze swept the room and landed on Amalia. It stayed there a beat too long.
"And see that she's presentable. I won't have the pack staring at another disgrace when he rides through those gates."
A few servants glanced her way, then dropped their eyes to the floor. Amalia felt the heat crawl up her neck, but she kept her jaw locked and her hands still. She had practiced this so many times it barely hurt anymore. Barely.
Helena waved the servants off. When the room had emptied, she stepped closer, close enough that Amalia caught the thick scent of her perfume.
"You'll stand at the front tomorrow," she said, low enough that only Amalia could hear. "Shoulders back. Smile, if you have to remember how. Embarrass him in front of his people, and you'll find out exactly how much worse things here can get."
Amalia lifted her chin and met her eyes. "I understand."
Helena held the look a moment longer, searching for a crack, then turned and walked away. Only once her footsteps had faded down the corridor did Amalia let her shoulders drop.
She made her way to the eastern wing, where the halls ran colder and emptier. Wind pushed through the narrow windows and stirred the thin curtains. She liked it here. Nobody bothered to walk this far just to whisper something under their breath.
In her room, she slid the bar across the door and sat on the edge of the bed. Her hands were shaking slightly — small, useless tremors she pressed flat against her knees until they stopped. Then she opened the bottom drawer of the old chest and lifted out a small wooden box, worn smooth at the corners from years of handling.
She never opened it. She just held it, the weight of it settling something in her chest that nothing else could. It was the only piece of her parents she had left — not their faces, not their voices, just this. Proof that once, someone had wanted her to have something to remember them by.
She traced her thumb once along the edge of the lid, feeling the familiar groove worn into the wood. Then she set it back in the drawer and pushed it shut, harder than she meant to.
The afternoon went into the healer's hall — counting herbs, rewrapping bandages, marking numbers onto a strip of parchment. It was work that asked nothing of her except her hands, and for a few hours her mind went quiet. Near dusk, Rhea, the head healer, came in, looked over the tally, and nodded once.
"You stayed up doing the night records again."
"Yes."
"Thank you." Rhea never said much more than that, but something in Amalia's chest loosened anyway. She nodded back and slipped out before the moment could turn into anything else.
Dinner was in the great hall. Helena held court at the high table, talking through tomorrow's welcome — which warriors would line the entrance, which rooms still needed airing out. Amalia took her usual seat at the far end of the lower table. Nobody passed her the bread. Nobody looked her way. She kept her eyes on her plate and ate without tasting any of it, the noise of the hall pressing in like something physical.
When the meal finally ended, she slipped out through the side door and cut behind the training yard instead of through the main corridors. The cold bit at her face, sharp enough to clear her head. Frost had already started silvering the grass.
Voices drifted out from the open shutters of the barracks, and she slowed without meaning to.
"Rider came at first light. The Alpha crosses the northern border tomorrow."
"About time. This war's dragged on long enough."
"He's not riding in alone. Bringing the woman who pulled him out of that ambush last moon."
Amalia's feet stopped moving before she'd decided to stop.
"They're saying she saved his life herself. He's already had the high chambers prepared for her."
Someone laughed, short and easy. "So the pack finally gets a real Luna."
The laughter rolled on, careless, unaware anyone could hear it. Amalia stood in the dark with her arms wrapped around herself, the cold suddenly reaching somewhere deeper than her skin. A real Luna. Two words, and somehow they undid something she'd spent years trying to hold together.
She waited until the voices moved off before she turned back, and the walk to the eastern wing felt longer than it ever had, her legs heavy, her throat tight in a way she refused to name.
Back in her room, she barred the door and sank onto the bed. Beyond the walls, the house was still awake with preparation boots on stone, someone shouting a list of names, furniture scraping across a floor somewhere below. Tomorrow Konrad would ride through the gates with another woman beside him. A woman the whole pack was already whispering about like a gift they'd been promised. The chambers being readied were rooms Amalia had never once been allowed to think of as her own, though she was the one who wore his ring.
She looked at the drawer where the wooden box sat, hidden and quiet. She didn't take it out again. She just sat there as the candle burned down to nothing, watching the flame shrink, feeling everything she'd swallowed all day rise up now that no one was left to see it, a hard, hot pressure behind her eyes that she blinked back on reflex, out of habit more than will.
She didn't cry. She hadn't let herself in a long time. She sat in the dark instead, still and silent, and let herself wonder just once, just for tonight whether tomorrow would be the day everyone finally stopped pretending she was still there at all.