[Skyler’s POV]
The enforcer arrives at my clinic station before the morning coffee cools—young, broad-shouldered, delivering the news like someone who'd rather be anywhere else.
"Kitchen duty, effective immediately. Luna's orders. Your children have been transferred to communal care on the east wing."
My hand stops on the intake forms. The east wing is Kailani's territory.
My children are going to be surrounded by wolves who answer to the woman who held my hand over a burner when I was fourteen. Dylan is gone, three days of border business, and the timing is so surgical I could set a watch by my sister's cruelty.
I don't go to the kitchen. I go straight to Kailani's rooms.
Every step is a mistake I'm making with my eyes open. Logic says ‘wait, think, find another way.’ My legs say ‘now.’
She's at her vanity when I enter, applying something to her cheekbones with a brush that probably cost more than my monthly wages at Crescent Ridge. The mirror catches us both—her gilded, glowing; me in clinic scrubs and day-old hair.
"My children," I say without a preamble but my voice comes out thinner than I intended. "You moved them without telling me?"
"I moved them to appropriate care." The brush continues its slow arc—unhurried and meditative. "You've been distracted at the clinic, Skyler. Distracted people make mistakes and poor children suffer because of that. I can’t let this happen to my precious nephews."
"I haven't made a single mistake. Dr. Vasquez said—"
"Dr. Vasquez doesn't decide staffing. I do." She sets the brush down and turns. "You seem confused about how things work here."
She rises, smoothing cream silk, and walks toward me with that unhurried stride imported whole from our childhood. The walk that always precedes the worst of it.
"You are in this pack because my husband negotiated your transfer. Your children attend school because I haven't objected." She stops close enough that her perfume burns my sinuses. "Those aren't rights. They're privileges."
My nails cut crescents into my palms. "This isn't about the clinic."
"No." Her smile opens, and there it is—the honesty she saves for audiences of one. "This is about you forgetting your place."
She tilts her head. "Leon trains your son, watches you on the bleachers like you're something worth studying… What's next? He’ll be reading your daughter to sleep? Did you really think I wouldn't notice?"
Every word strikes where she aims it, and I can feel my resistance crumbling—not all at once, but in the quiet way a wall gives before anyone sees the crack.
The smart move is to leave, regroup, find leverage. Instead my mouth opens and what comes out is the thing I swore I'd never give her.
"Please, at least don't take them from the school. Ashton just started settling in, and River has friends for the first time in her life…" My throat works around words that taste like rust. "Punish me however you want. But leave them where they are."
I'm begging. I can hear myself from outside my own body—desperate, small, pathetic—and the worst part isn't the begging itself, it's how easily I fold back into it.
And here I thought I'd begun to build something harder, something stronger than the mess I let everyone make of me in my own pack. All it takes to prove me wrong is one morning and the memory of Kailani's hand on the lever, putting me right back in that kitchen at fourteen, pleading with the girl who burned me.
The words never work. But I said them anyway, because my children are on the other side of them.
Kailani watches me fascinated and almost tender. "Now that's the tone I was looking for."
She reaches out and adjusts my scrub collar with two fingers, smoothing it flat, and my skin crawls so hard I nearly step back. "You forgot this. Maybe when my husband started noticing you, or when Dylan started chauffeuring your children. But somewhere, you forgot what you are—a worthless nobody."
Her honeyed voice is slicing my eardrums. I want it to stop, to get back, to leave, but if I do that right now—
She already relayed to me what she planned to do with the twins. So I plant myself like a tree, and listen, my teeth clenched.
"This is me reminding you." She turns back to the vanity. "Kitchen. Now. Be grateful I didn't send them further." She catches my eyes in the mirror. "Close the door on your way out."
For three seconds I just stood there. Fists shaking at my sides, jaw aching from the clench, and every cell screaming to say something that would crack that composure. But I don't, because the last time I fought back she went after my kids.
Kailani doesn't lose. She just changes the price.
I pull the door shut, and the click of the latch is the loneliest sound I've ever produced.
The kitchen is all steel surfaces and steam vents. They hand me a pad of steel wool and by the second hour my knuckles are split in thin lines that open and close with each stroke. I've arrived at the flat grey nothing past anger—where the body works because stopping requires a decision the brain can't make.
I'm rinsing blood off a sheet pan when the room goes quiet—all at once. The way air shifts when something that outranks everyone present walks in.
"Skyler." Leon's voice, behind me.
The moment he enters, the staff develops a sudden fascination with their workstations. I turn with my hands dripping pink water onto the floor. He's in training clothes, t-shirt wet with sweat, and whatever he came here expecting, it wasn't this.
His gaze drops to my hands and the pleasantness evacuates from his face—replaced by something still and focused that makes my breath catch.
"Who reassigned you?" No greeting. No preamble.
"It doesn't matter." I reach for the next pan because standing still under that gaze is worse. Because if I stop moving I'll feel the full weight of this day and I'm not sure my knees will hold. "I'm fine."
He steps closer—not touching, but close enough that heat radiates off his skin. "Who."
Not a question. A single word with the full weight of Alpha behind it, quiet enough that only I hear and heavy enough that my hands stop moving.
"Luna Kailani." The name exits before caution can catch it, and the instant it's airborne I want it back.
Naming her means admitting I went to my sister's room and begged and walked out with nothing. Then I mention how something passes behind his eyes—quick and then swallowed whole.
Leon nods once, turns, and walks out without raising his voice or breaking stride.
He doesn't come back. He doesn't need to.
Forty-three minutes later, the same enforcer appears. "Dr. Vasquez needs you back at the clinic. Your children have been returned to the school wing."
No explanation, no attribution—just a correction so absolute it might as well have been weather. I wash my hands and the water finds every crack, and I think about the two times Leon has stepped between me and Kailani.
Both times quiet, both times immovable, both times leaving me with a question I don't have language for.
That night, the twins were loud and safe and mine again. Ashton eats in focused silence, his gaze finding my bandaged hands twice before he looks away. I know he'll ask later, in the dark, when his sister's asleep. He always does.
I'm pulling the blanket over River's shoulder when something starts—a prickle at my scalp, racing down my neck, spreading across my arms to my fingertips. I rub my arms but the sensation doesn't fade—it sharpens. Pressing outward, warm and insistent and entirely impossible, humming beneath the skin like a second pulse.