The salary deduction had done what nothing else that morning had managed to do. All that easy certainty, and comfortable assumptions about where this was heading and how it would end, had quietly packed up and left the moment the numbers became real.

Smug expressions had gone rigid. Confident eyes had gone calculating. And almost as one, they turned toward Daisy because surely she would say something now.

Surely, she would step in. She was going to be their Luna. She had been the one standing in that corner feeding the whole thing through mind link, and they had assumed, without ever putting it into words, that that meant she was in this with them all the way.

They had absolutely no idea what was coming next.

"You all know how much my parents care for her," Ravyn continued, his voice staying even and unhurried, giving the room nothing to grab onto and use. "Had it not been for them, Luna Seraphine—"

"I am no longer your Luna."

Seraphine’s voice came in clean and well-placed, not loud, nor heated, carrying no particular emotion behind it. Just a correction, stated with the same calm you’d use to point out a wrong turn.

Ravyn swallowed once. "You haven’t been replaced. The title still stands."

The color left Daisy’s face in one complete, uninterrupted pull.

Then Seraphine spoke again, and when it came it was warm, almost gentle, which somehow made it land considerably worse than anything sharp could have. "In that case, I formally renounce my title as Luna of the Centenary Pack."

She let that sit for exactly one breath. "Going forward, I am simply Seraphine Walker. Those I choose to allow may call me Sera."

The room went still in a way it hadn’t gone still before.

Ravyn drew in a slow breath and held it for a moment behind closed lips. She had this particular gift for locating the exact point where you believed you’d found the upper hand and quietly moving it somewhere you couldn’t reach, all without raising her voice or breaking her composure.

He’d forgotten that about her. Or maybe he’d spent so many years not paying close enough attention that he’d let himself believe it had faded. It hadn’t faded. If anything, her time away had refined it.

He pulled himself back to the full picture. Not just the cure, though the cure mattered enormously. The investment. The connections. The doors she moved through in the human business world that he’d never once been able to get close to, no matter how he’d tried.

She was holding more than he’d ever given her credit for, and she didn’t need a single thing from him to keep holding it.

He needed her far more than she needed him. That was the plain, unadorned truth of it, and spending energy fighting it was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

"If that’s what you want, Sera."

"It’s Seraphine," she said. "For you."

Ravyn swallowed the correction and took it. "Seraphine." He turned his attention back to the room, to all those faces still trying to recalibrate what kind of morning this had turned into.

"What I want this pack to understand is that she is a major figure in the city’s business world. The fact that she made an exception to come out here at all is something every one of you should be grateful for. And that gratitude starts with my parents."

Kevin’s voice came out carefully, feeling its way across uncertain ground. "Alpha, are you saying she’s actually—"

"If you need confirmation," Ravyn said, without a flicker of impatience, "ask Alpha Voren."

At her sides, Daisy’s hands had closed into fists, tight enough that her knuckles had gone the color of bone.

"Luna Sera, we’re so sorry," Diane started, and another voice was already rising right behind hers when Seraphine lifted one hand.

Everything stopped.

"That’s enough." Her voice didn’t need volume. It had something better than that. "If you’re offering me respect because of what I’ve built, then it isn’t respect but it’s strategy. You stood in this gym this morning and mocked me. After everything I gave to this pack, that is what you chose to do."

She let the silence sit for a moment, unhurried. "I have no use for an apology that only arrived attached to a financial consequence."

She turned back to Ravyn with the composed ease of someone crossing something off a list. "Thirty minutes gone."

"Kevin. Diane. Audrey. Fred."

Ravyn’s voice dropped into that particular register, the one that doesn’t need any volume behind it because the weight does all the work on its own. Four names, stated plainly, and every person in the room felt the drop in temperature that came with them.

"You start running now, exactly the way Bryan described. You run until she tells you to stop. Today, tomorrow, every day she’s here. Rain included."

"Alpha, please—" Diane’s voice broke open with something desperate in it.

"That’s on top of the salary deduction for the cure," Ravyn added, ignoring the plea.

The murmuring that broke out across the gym was immediate and uncontrolled, voices overlapping, cutting across each other, the sound of a room trying to absorb something it hadn’t budgeted for.

Bryan’s face, which had been carrying the weight of the morning in ways no child’s face should have to, finally released into something real, the first actual smile that had made it all the way through since he’d walked in that morning, full and unguarded and entirely satisfied, spread across his features.

And when Daisy saw it, something moved through her chest that felt uncomfortably close to loss. Like watching a child choose a side and understanding, with a cold and quiet certainty, that the side he’d chosen wasn’t hers.

The four of them stood in the middle of the floor doing the kind of arithmetic that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The salary deduction alone was bad enough. The running was humiliating enough.

But as they stood there turning it over, something else arrived, slow at first, then all at once, the way realizations tend to when you’ve been trying not to have them.

They had not done this alone.

Daisy had set the tone from the very beginning. She had been the one in the corner sending the mind links, pointing the room in the direction it went, and they had followed because they’d believed she was leading somewhere safe. They had taken on every consequence of a plan that hadn’t been theirs.

Audrey’s mind link went out before the thought had even fully formed.

If you don’t help us out of this humiliation right now, we are going to tell the Alpha you put us up to every bit of this.