Irina’s POV

I couldn’t sit still.

That was the problem.

I’d tried. Twice. Once on the edge of the bed, once in the chair by the window. Both times lasted less than five minutes before I was up again, moving, doing nothing in particular with my feet except refusing to stay in one place.

The vial was in my pocket.

I’d stopped thinking about that. Or I was trying to.

The palace had settled into its mid-morning rhythm—staff moving between floors, the distant sound of a radio from somewhere in the kitchens, guards rotating in and out of position. Ordinary. The whole place was unrelentingly ordinary, and I was walking through it with poison in my pocket and my heart doing something wrong in my chest and absolutely nowhere useful to go.

I stopped a maid in the east corridor. Young. Neat braid. I didn’t know her name.

"I’m looking for someone," I said. "A woman. Her name is Katerina."

She looked at me blankly.

"Katerina," I repeated. "She would have come here about fourteen months ago. Maybe she goes by something else now, I’m not sure. Brown hair. Taller than me. She’d be—" I stopped.

The maid shook her head. "I’m sorry, miss. I don’t know that name."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, miss." She looked genuinely uncertain. "I could ask around if—"

"It’s fine. Thank you."

I kept walking.

I asked three more people before I gave up on asking.

Nobody knew a Katerina. Which meant nothing, except that it had been fourteen months and a person who ran didn’t keep using their own name. I knew that. I’d thought about running enough times to know the first thing you did was become someone else.

If Katerina was here, she was someone else.

And nobody was going to point me to her by name.

I took a different hallway. One I hadn’t been down before. The palace had too many of them—corridors that branched and looped back, wings that served no obvious purpose, doors that were always closed and rooms I’d never been in. I’d stopped mapping it weeks ago. There was too much ground and I was never going to know all of it.

The hallway ended at a side door.

I pushed it open.

Outside, the morning had warmed up. The kind of pale gold warmth that felt almost accidental—like the sun had shown up out of habit rather than intention. The grounds stretched away from the door. Formal paths. Trimmed hedges. And past all of that, a garden. A real one. Not the manicured kind by the main entrance but something older, tucked back against the east wall. Unruly at the edges. Flowers that hadn’t been pruned into submission.

I didn’t know this part of the grounds existed.

I walked toward it.

The path wasn’t well-kept. Grass had started creeping over the stones. The hedges on either side were tall enough to block the palace from view, and then I came around a corner and the palace was just—gone. Just the garden, and the wall, and a wooden bench near a cluster of overgrown roses.

I sat down on the bench.

Pressed my hands flat against my thighs.

Breathed.

The garden was quiet. That was the thing. Genuinely quiet. No footsteps. No radio. No sound of guards or staff or Nicolas’s voice giving orders somewhere. Just a bird, somewhere in the roses, doing its indifferent bird thing.

My eyes burned.

I pressed the heel of my hand against one eye. Then the other. Not crying. I wasn’t going to cry. There was too much I still didn’t know how to think about and if I started crying I’d have to stop thinking about all of it, and I didn’t have the luxury of stopping right now.

*He’s going to find out who she was working with.*

That was what Nicolas had said. Easy. Casual. Like it was a minor administrative task.

Sofia was still out there. Still folding napkins and bringing coffee and carrying around six months of grief and a plan that was going to get her killed.

And I was sitting in a garden doing nothing.

Because what was I supposed to do? Turn her in? Let Nicolas—

The bird stopped.

I looked up.

On the far side of the garden, near the wall, someone was walking.

I almost didn’t notice. They were moving slowly, head down, hands in the pockets of a plain gray coat. The kind of person who looked like they were trying not to be looked at. The kind of walk I recognized immediately—the walk of someone who had learned that occupying too much space had consequences.

I got up.

I didn’t know why. Some instinct. Something that made me start moving across the garden toward them, feet quiet on the overgrown path, before I’d made any kind of decision.

They hadn’t seen me.

Still walking. Head still down. Shoulders slightly forward, like they were carrying something invisible.

I was ten feet away.

Five.

I reached out and put my hand on their shoulder.

They spun around.

And the world stopped.

Because the face looking back at me—wide-eyed, startled, color drained—was a face I’d spent the last year trying not to think about. Trying not to dream about. The same face I’d stared at for hours when I was twelve years old and she was seventeen and I thought she was the most important person in the world.

Katerina.

Her hair was different. Shorter. The color slightly different from how I remembered it, which meant she’d done something to change it. Her face was thinner. Older. There was something in her eyes—before the shock set in, before the walls went up—that looked tired in a way that fourteen months would explain.

She’d put on a little weight around the middle.

Just a little.

My throat closed.

"Katerina," I said.

Her eyes went wild.

She pulled back. My hand fell away from her shoulder. She pulled back another step, and then another, and her expression had gone from shock to something else—something sharp and hunted—and then she turned.

And ran.

I ran after her.

I didn’t think about it. My body just went. Feet hitting the path, my pulse slamming, the garden blurring on either side. She was faster than I expected—or maybe I was slower than I used to be, months of not eating and not sleeping and not going anywhere catching up—but I was desperate in a way she wasn’t, and desperate moves differently.

"Katerina—"

She didn’t stop.

She hit the corner of the garden path and cut left, heading for the gap in the hedges, and I lunged.

My fingers caught her wrist.

She yanked. Hard. Harder than I expected. I stumbled, almost went down, but held on. My grip tightened. Her arm pulled back.

We both stopped.

Breathing hard.

Her back was to me. Her wrist in my hand. The gap in the hedge was three steps away.

"Let me go," she said.

Her voice was different too. Lower. More controlled. Not the Katerina I remembered, who laughed too loud and cried at stupid things and used to steal food from the kitchen at midnight because she could.

"No," I said.

"Irina—"

"Why are you running?" My voice came out cracked. I hadn’t meant it to. "It’s me. It’s—why are you running from me?"

She turned around.

Slowly.

Her face had settled into something careful. Something decided. Like she’d already had this conversation in her head a hundred times and she knew exactly how she wanted it to go.

That made something cold move through my chest.

"You’ve been here," I said. "This whole time. You’ve been *here.*"

"Keep your voice down."

"You’ve been here and you didn’t—" I stopped. My hand was still around her wrist. I could feel her pulse. Fast. "I was in this palace for weeks. Weeks. And you just—you didn’t say anything. You didn’t come find me, you didn’t—"

"I know." Her voice was flat.

"You knew I was here?"

She didn’t answer immediately.

That was answer enough.

My grip loosened. She didn’t pull away. She just stood there, looking at me with those careful eyes, and I stood there looking back at her, and the garden was very quiet around both of us.

"When?" I said. "When did you know?"

"A few days after you arrived." She exhaled through her nose. "The staff talks. Word gets around."

A few days.

She’d known for weeks.

Something moved through me that wasn’t quite pain and wasn’t quite anger. Something older than both of those things, something that had its roots in a twelve-year-old girl who’d thought she had a sister and then spent the next several years slowly realizing she’d been wrong.

"And you stayed away," I said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

She looked at me.

Her jaw moved.

"Because I have a life here," she said. "A real one. My mate is here. My—" She stopped. Her hand moved, almost involuntarily, to her stomach. Then she pulled it back. "I built something. It took me everything to build it. And if I walked into your life again—if I let you into mine—it all falls apart."

"I was in that pack house for a year," I said.

"I know."

"A *year*, Katerina. While you were here. While you were—" My voice broke on the word and I stopped and tried again. "You left me there. With him."

Her face did something complicated.

"I didn’t know what he was going to do—"

"You knew what he was capable of." The words came out harder than I meant. "You dated him for two years. You *knew.*"

She pressed her lips together. Said nothing.

"Did you think about it?" I couldn’t stop talking. Couldn’t stop the words coming up and out, things I’d swallowed for a year and a half because there was nobody to say them to. "Did you ever think about calling? Sending a message? Even once? Just to—just to know if I was—"

"I couldn’t," she said. Quiet. Controlled. "I cut the pack link. If I contacted anyone in the pack, he would have found me."

"I know."

"I had to disappear completely."

"I know." My voice cracked again. "I know that. I understand why you did what you did." I looked at her face. At the controlled, careful face of a woman who’d made hard choices and was prepared to defend every one of them. "I just want to know if you thought about me."

Silence.

The bird had come back. Somewhere in the roses. The same indifferent sound.

Katerina looked at me for a long moment.

And then something moved across her face. Just for a second. Something that cracked the controlled surface—something that looked like grief, or like guilt, or like the specific ache of a person who had done the best they could and knew it still wasn’t enough.

She looked away.

"You need to go back to your room," she said.

"What?"

"Go back inside." Her voice had changed. Shifted back into something harder. Something decisive. "This was—this was a mistake. Both of us. This shouldn’t have happened."

"Katerina—"

"Don’t." She stepped back. Not running this time. Just—removing herself. Creating distance. "Don’t call me that here. That’s not my name anymore."

"It’s your *name.*"

"Not here." Her eyes found mine. Something fierce in them now. Something I recognized from years ago—the Katerina who got what she wanted because she always found a way to get it, no matter the cost. "I’m not Katerina. I haven’t been Katerina for fourteen months. And you—" She stopped. Her chin lifted. "You don’t belong here either. This isn’t your life. This was never going to be your life."

My chest pulled.

"Katerina—"

"I’m not going to tell you again." Her voice was steady. Completely steady, which made it worse. "Don’t call me sister anymore." Her voice dropped. Went quiet. "I’ve already contacted Father. He’s coming to take you away."