Irina’s POV

I lay in the dark and thought about what Maxim had said.

Not because I wanted to. I’d spent three hours trying not to think about it, and I’d failed, and now it was somewhere past midnight and I was staring at the ceiling with his voice running on a loop in my head.

*Nobody wants you, Irina. Nobody ever wanted you.*

*Something people leave. Something people use and throw away.*

I turned onto my side.

The sheets were cold. Nicolas hadn’t come back. I’d half-expected him to—I don’t know why, some stupid, animal part of me had spent the evening listening for footsteps in the hallway—but the corridor stayed quiet and the door stayed closed and eventually I stopped listening.

He wasn’t coming.

I pressed my face into the pillow.

Maxim’s words were poison. I knew that. I’d always known that. He had a gift for finding the places that already hurt and pressing down until your whole world narrowed to that one point of pain. He’d done it for a year. I’d gotten good at recognizing it.

Recognizing it didn’t make it stop working.

*The second some real alpha female walks through his door—*

*He’s going to look at you and wonder what he was ever thinking.*

I rolled over again.

The vial was on the nightstand. I’d found it on the floor after Nicolas left, tucked against the baseboard like it had rolled there and been waiting. I’d set it on the nightstand and hadn’t touched it since.

I looked at it now.

Small. Glass. Catching the faint light from under the door.

*Nicolas.* The way he’d held me last night. The way his arms had come up—slow, like he was deciding each inch—and then tightened like he didn’t want to stop. The way he’d said *come here* like I wasn’t already pressed against him.

And then he hadn’t come back.

One night. One night of that, and then nothing.

Maybe Maxim was right.

Maybe—

No.

I sat up.

That was the thing Maxim did. That was exactly the thing. He got inside your head and he started rearranging the furniture and if you let him, you’d come back to yourself days later and not recognize anything.

I wasn’t going to let him.

But.

But I also wasn’t an idiot.

I picked up the vial.

Turned it in my fingers.

*Their time here is short,* Nicolas had said. About Maxim. About my father.

I knew what that meant. I’d told him I knew. And once Maxim was gone—once that particular problem was handled, once the loose end was tied—what then? What did I become then? Nicolas had gotten what he needed from this situation. Whatever political purpose I served, whatever complication Maxim’s presence had created that my existence helped solve.

Once Maxim was dead, I was just—here.

A marked omega with no wolf, no pack, no city pass. *Inside the palace walls. Don’t even think about getting out.*

That was my life now. That was what the mate bond and the mark and last night had bought me. Better rooms. That was all.

The vial was warm in my hand.

*The faster he’s poisoned,* I thought, *the sooner this is over.*

The sooner I could—what? Go somewhere? Where? I didn’t have an answer to that. But the alternative was staying here and waiting and hoping, and hope had never done anything useful for me.

I’d been waiting for someone else to decide my life for long enough.

---

I made the tea myself.

Sofia had shown me the kitchen a week ago—the small one adjacent to the east corridor, not the main kitchen where thirty people worked, just a narrow room with a kettle and a cabinet of supplies for when staff needed something quick. I’d filed it away without thinking about it. Old habit.

It was past midnight. Nobody was there.

I boiled water. Found a box of good tea—the expensive kind, the kind that smelled like bergamot and something else I didn’t have a name for. Found a small tray. Found cups.

I made two cups.

My hands were steady.

That surprised me a little. I’d expected them to shake. But they didn’t. I moved through the steps the same way I’d moved through the steps of a hundred things I’d done while not wanting to do them—cleaning that pack house floor, serving at Maxim’s dinners, standing at the edge of rooms being invisible on purpose.

You just did the thing. You kept your hands moving. You didn’t think too far ahead.

I took out the vial.

Tiny amount, Sofia had said. *Tiny is enough.*

My thumb over the stopper.

I thought about his face in the dark this morning. That close, quiet look. *I knew you had a reason.* Like he’d already decided to believe me before I’d said anything.

I pressed my mouth flat.

I opened the vial.

One small drop. Into one cup. The liquid disappeared immediately—clear and gone, like it had never been there.

I put the stopper back.

Picked up the tray.

---

His office was in the north wing.

I knew that. I’d never been there on my own—always escorted, always with Roman hovering somewhere behind me—but I’d mapped the palace the way I mapped everywhere I lived. Exits first. Then the rooms with power in them.

The corridor was quiet at this hour. Two guards on the main staircase. They looked at me, at the tray, and something in their expressions shifted.

"Alpha’s orders," I said. "He asked for tea."

The north wing was different from the rest of the palace.

Quieter. The carpet was thicker. The lights lower. The whole corridor had that specific, contained feel of a place where serious things happened and the walls knew it.

I could hear voices.

Two of them. Low. From behind the door at the end of the corridor. The door with the light on underneath it.

I slowed.

Stopped.

My heart was going again. Stupid. I’d gotten all the way here without it—through the kitchen, through the east wing, up two flights, past two guards—and now ten feet from the door my whole chest had decided this was a good moment to come apart.

I looked at the tray.

Two cups. One of them with something clear dissolved in the bottom.

*Move,* I told myself.

I walked.

Closer. The voices getting clearer. One of them was Andrei—I recognized the cadence, that easy, almost bored tone he used when he was saying something important and didn’t want you to notice.

"—already confirmed. Three different sources."

Nicolas’s voice. Lower. "How long has she been there?"

"Since before you marked Irina. Give or take."

A pause.

I stopped.

Five feet from the door.

A sound. Footsteps again. Closer to the door now. I took one step back on instinct.

Then—Nicolas’s voice. Clear and flat and certain in the way it always was when he’d already made a decision and was just informing the room of it.

"Go find," he said.

A pause.

"Katerina."