Sebastian turned his head and looked at her, and for a moment neither of them said anything.

"How is your back?" He asked, his voice coming out rougher than he intended.

"Gone." She said quietly. "It’s completely gone. Thank you."

He nodded and looked back at the ceiling. "Good." He said. "Come here then." He opened his arm to her.

Viola moved carefully across the bed after pulling her shirt back on and settled against his side, and his arm came around her without hesitation, pulling her in close. She rested her head against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, which was not nearly as steady as he was pretending it was.

She closed her eyes, but sleep was the last thing her body was interested in. She had been unconscious for days and her mind was too awake now, too aware of too many things at once, to slide easily into rest.

Neither of them said a word about what had almost happened. The silence between them held it without either of them needing to name it, and Viola let it sit there for a while before she broke it.

"Did they catch the people responsible for the assassination?" She asked quietly.

Sebastian let out a slow breath. "Not yet." He said. "We are still working on drawing the person out."

Viola felt the restlessness that had been sitting underneath her skin since she woke up sharpen at those words. The thought that whoever had done this was still out there, still unaccounted for, still planning, made it difficult to lie still. "How do you plan to do that?"

"By faking my death." Sebastian said it with the easy nonchalance of someone announcing a minor schedule change, like it was the most ordinary solution in the world. "The announcement will go out to everyone in Silver tomorrow. The Alpha is dead."

Viola tilted her head slightly to look up at him. "Do you really think that will work? What if the person doesn’t come out?"

Sebastian shrugged the shoulder she wasn’t resting on. "Whoever is behind this is eager. Eager people don’t sit still when they hear what they have been waiting for. They move. And when they move to claim the seat, they will show themselves. Even if I don’t manage to catch the main culprit immediately, I will know which of my enemies wants me gone badly enough to have gone to these lengths for the seat. That alone narrows things considerably."

Viola was quiet for a moment, turning his plan over in her mind and examining it from different angles, when his voice broke through her thoughts.

"How did I survive?" He asked quietly, looking down at her, his breath warm against her forehead.

Viola thought about Miss Lara’s warning. The seriousness in the woman’s voice when she had pushed the buckets of water away and told her to keep that ability hidden from every werewolf she ever met, not to trust any of them with it.

She didn’t fully understand why she was holding the warning so close, and she didn’t fully understand why even now, lying against someone she trusted more than most people she had ever known, something in her kept the whole truth just out of reach.

"We used water to cool the bullets down and draw them out." Viola said, keeping her voice even. "Miss Lara figured it out."

It wasn’t a complete lie. But it wasn’t the whole truth either, and the part she left out sat quietly in her chest as she closed her eyes again and listened to the unsteady rhythm of his heart beneath her cheek, willing herself to go to sleep and not dwell on why she didn’t tell him the complete truth.

Sebastian watched her closed eyes, her lashes casting soft shadows over her cheeks, and he couldn’t help but narrow his eyes. He could have sworn he’d caught fragments of a conversation between her and Miss Lara about her doing something to remove the bullet, but his mind hadn’t been clear at the time, so maybe he had misheard them...

---

The moment the sun rose over Silver the next day, Matt made the announcement through the pack conference system, pushing it to every screen in the city. Every pack member who saw it stopped what they were doing and stared. The holographic screens displayed a clear image of the Alpha lying in a pool of blood with bullet wounds across his body, and that detail alone made the news land with a weight that left no room for doubt.

The werewolves of Silver’s reacted with gasped around the city. Many couldn’t help thinking that it had always been a possibility, that a supreme Alpha known to travel without a full warrior escort was always taking a risk, but none of them had expected it to happen before he left an heir behind like the Alphas who had come before him.

What were they supposed to do now? The Alpha seat couldn’t simply be handed to whoever was available. It required Alpha blood, a specific lineage, and there was no heir waiting to be groomed for it. The thought of the seat sitting empty made people’s chests tighten with a particular kind of fear that went beyond ordinary grief.

A pack without an Alpha didn’t stay standing for long. Everyone in Silver knew that. The Alpha was the thread holding everything else together, the safety, the order, the alliances, all of it. Without him it could unravel faster than anyone wanted to think about.

What if their pack become an ordinary pack like the others?

"...We ask that everyone remain calm while the elders work to address the situation and identify a path forward. Thank you." Matt finished the announcement with those words before the screen went dark, but calm was the last thing anyone in Silver was feeling as the crowds outside the High Tower began to swell with people demanding answers and action from the elders.