_Rowena’s POV_

The ice pack Velvet got me helped, but it was not enough.

I sat on the stairs for another few minutes before Celeste gently pulled me upright and walked me to my room. The wrist wasn’t broken, I’d had broken bones before and knew the difference, but the joint had twisted badly and the pain had a deep, persistent quality that told me it wasn’t going to fade on its own schedule.

I closed the bedroom door.

“Kyra,” I said quietly.

She stirred. Not fully awake, the rest she’d been settling into was the first real rest she’d had in years and I had pulled her out of it early. I felt the reluctance in it, the heaviness of a wolf who had been running on empty for a long time and had only just found ground to lie down on.

“How bad?” she asked.

“Wrist. Twisted but broken.”

A pause. Then the familiar warmth moved through my arm, slow and deliberate, like heat working its way through cold muscle. Kyra’s healing had always been quiet, nothing like the dramatic flare I’d heard described in wolves with stronger bonds. Mine was more like being wrapped in something warm.

Gradually.

“You need to let me rest properly,” she said, while she worked. “I can’t do this at half-strength.”

“I know. After tonight.”

She made a sound that was not agreement but accepted it anyway.

By the time Velvet knocked and came in with fresh bandaging and a look that said she had questions she was choosing not to ask, the worst of the pain had eased to something manageable. I let Velvet wrap the wrist anyway, for appearance’s sake.

“Velvet,” I said, while she worked.

“My Luna.”

“Grace left before my grandparents came back inside.”

“Yes.” Her hands were steady.

“My grandmother didn’t see it happen.”

A pause. “No. She was in the sitting room.”

“Keep it that way,” I said. “She’s a lot of years old and she drove across the city today because she wanted to be here when I came home. I’m not giving her something to worry about tonight.”

Velvet looked at me for a moment. Then she nodded, tied off the bandage, and said nothing else about it.

Alice arrived at seven.

I heard the car from my room. I was downstairs before she reached the front door, which meant I saw her face before she had time to arrange it fully.

She was working up to something. I could see it in the set of her shoulders, the slight over-brightness in her eyes, the careful construction of distress that hadn’t quite finished assembling itself.

“Rowena.” She came through the door and reached for my hands, both of them, which meant she didn’t notice the bandaged wrist, which confirmed she hadn’t spoken to Grace yet. “My poor girl. After everything you’ve been through.”

“I’m alright, Grandma Alice,” I said.

“Divorced.” She said it with the weight of a word that had personally wronged her. “Thrown out of your own home. Your mother would be devastated.”

“I wasn’t thrown out,” I said pleasantly. “I left. There’s a difference.”

“It amounts to the same thing.” She let go of my hands and looked around the entrance hall with eyes that were moving too quickly, taking inventory rather than simply looking. “And this house. Are they planning to, Celeste mentioned renovation.....”

“The east wing needed painting,” I said. “That’s done now.”

Alice’s gaze settled on me. Behind the performed heartbreak, something sharper was working, the same think I had been noticing for years without fully naming. The way she gathered information. The way she asked questions that were pointed in specific directions. The way her distress always seemed to serve a function.

I had spent three years at the Varkos estate learning to read rooms. I could read this one.

“Come and sit down,” I said. “I’ll have tea brought.”

I kept her for an hour, long enough to be courteous, not long enough to give her anything useful. She asked about the dissolution, about the title Alaric had granted, about the Ashthorne Group’s current standing. I answered each question with something that sounded like an answer and contained nothing she could use.

She left before nine, kissing my cheek at the door with the warmth of a woman who was satisfied she had learned something.

She hadn’t.

I stood in the entrance hall after her car pulled away and held that thought carefully.

“So you don’t trust your grandma?” Kyra chuckled, even if she should be resting.

“I haven’t trusted her in a long time,” I said. “I’m just starting to pay attention to why.”

“She came to your house at Moonreign when she thought you were being divorced. Not to support you. To assess.”

I didn’t answer and just went upstairs, unwrapped my wrist, healed enough now that the bandage was more story than necessity, and went to sleep.

Morning came in through the east window in long flat panels of light, and for the first time in three years I woke up without the particular feeling that had been sitting on my chest since the night Kaelen came home.

I lay still for a moment and checked for it.

Gone.

“Good morning,” Kyra said cheerfully. She had rested well. Genuinely rested, for the first time since before the marriage. Her voice had a different quality to it, clearer, fuller, the way it had sounded when I was younger and we were both still learning what we were.

“Good morning,” I said.

I got dressed and went downstairs.

The Ashthorne estate in the morning was a different thing from the Varkos estate in the morning. Where Moonreign had always felt like a house managing its own tensions, this felt like somewhere that had simply been waiting.

My grandfather was already at the breakfast table with his newspaper and his ongoing grudge against his physician, which expressed itself as eating eggs he’d been told to limit while reading articles he planned to argue with later. He glanced up when I came in, registered that I was upright and functional, and went back to his paper. That, more than anything, made something in me settle completely.

Then three women came in together.

My sisters-in-law...... married to my father’s three brothers’ sons, which made them family by marriage and, in this house, by everything else too. Miriam, who was the eldest, Victoria, who was younger and laughed too easily and had been the first person to hug me the night before without making it a statement. And Lena, who said very little and noticed everything and who met my eyes across the breakfast table with a look that contained a whole conversation she was saving for later.

They sat down. Miriam poured tea for everyone, including me, without asking how I took it because she already knew. Vicky asked me immediately what I wanted to do first, not about the divorce, not about the title, just what I wanted to do with my morning.

“Walk the garden,” I said.

“I’ll come,” Vicky said.

“Me too,” Lena said, which was notable because Lena didn’t usually volunteer for things.

We ate. We talked about nothing important.

After breakfast, I walked the garden with Vicky and Lena. The back path was the same as I remembered it, the old stone wall, the overgrown section near the gate that the management company had clearly decided wasn’t worth tackling, the bench under the ash tree where my mother had sat every morning when the weather allowed.

I sat on the bench.

Vicky sat beside me. Lena stood near the wall and looked at the garden with the assessing expression she brought to everything.

“Alice came last night,” I said.

“We know,” Vicky said. “Velvet mentioned she arrived uninvited.”

Glad they already met my maid.

“She was gathering information as usual.”

Lena turned from the wall. “We know that too.”

I looked at her. “How long have you known something was off with her?”

A pause. The two of them exchanged a glance, briefly.

“Long enough,” Miriam said, appearing through the back door with a second cup of tea she handed to me without comment. “We’ve been waiting for you to come home so we could tell you properly.”

I wrapped both hands around the cup, my interest piqued.

“Tell me.”