Serena’s body was doing something weird.

She had hugged Gavriel. A normal hug. A relief hug. The kind of hug you give a friend who had been dying in a bed the last time you saw him and was now standing upright and breathing and alive, and the alive was so good and so unexpected that her arms had moved before her brain could file the proper permissions.

Then her body had done the thing. The stiffening, the locking, the full-system shutdown that started in her shoulders and spread outward like ice across a pond. She blamed the necklace. She blamed it immediately, comprehensively, with the conviction of a woman who had been wearing dark magic jewelry for hours and whose body was entitled to a few malfunctions.

The necklace had been humming against her chest for hours. It had been muting her matebonds, dampening her scents, fogging her emotions, and generally rearranging the sensory architecture of her body without her permission. A hug feeling strange after all of that was the most logical explanation available, and Serena was selecting the most logical explanation and moving on.

She unclasped the pendant as they walked. The metal left her skin. The humming died.

Everything came back.

Dexmon’s matebond roared open. The channel that had been fogged, dampened, reduced to one-tenth of its capacity, flooded back to full volume and then some. His emotions crashed into her chest with the force of water breaking through a dam: frustration, concern, relief, territorial possessiveness, the low hum of jealousy that lived in his baseline like a resting heart rate, all of it arriving simultaneously, all of it louder than she remembered.

Fin’s matebond opened a half-second later. The same flood. Controlled worry, strategic irritation, the disciplined warmth he kept behind three walls that were now fully transparent, all of it pouring through a channel that had been a trickle for hours and was now a river.

Both of them were louder than before.

Too loud. The volume was wrong. The volume was higher than it had been before she put the necklace on, which made no sense, which meant either the necklace had recalibrated something in her body or her body was overcorrecting for the hours of silence by turning the dial past where it had been.

She was trying to sort through it. Trying to separate Dex’s channel from Fin’s, trying to determine which emotions belonged to which matebond, trying to organize the flood into something her brain could process without drowning.

But she couldn’t. There was too much tangled.

A breeze crossed the path from the east.

A new scent hit her like a punch.

It was warm. Deep. Layered. It carried notes she couldn’t name and a signature she couldn’t place and a pull that landed in her sternum with the specific, unmistakable gravity of something her body recognized before her mind could catch up.

Aurelia: Mate.

Serena: Our mates are behind us.

Aurelia: Yes. Three.

Serena’s stride faltered by a fraction. A fraction small enough that Elara, walking beside her, might have missed it. Might have.

Serena: Three of what?

Silence.

Serena: Aurelia.

Nothing. The wolf had retreated into the part of their shared consciousness where Serena’s questions could arrive and be received and be ignored.

Serena: Really?

The silence held. Aurelia was done. The wolf had delivered her headline and exited the broadcast, leaving Serena alone with a word that was bouncing off the walls of her skull and refusing to land anywhere that made sense.

Three. Aurelia had said three. Three mates. Two of whom were walking a hundred paces behind her and one of whom was.

No.

The breeze shifted. Dexmon’s scent this time, carried on the same wind, arriving a second after the unnamed one, and Dexmon’s scent was cedar and smoke and the specific warmth that her body had been orienting toward for months. The familiarity of it settled over the other scent like a blanket over a fire, dampening the newness, covering the unnamed with the known.

Her body was dealing with aftereffects. The necklace had been dark magic pressed against her skin for hours, muting channels that were designed to be open, and now those channels were overcorrecting.

The overcorrection was producing phantom scents and her wolf was misinterpreting the phantoms as something they were absolutely, categorically, impossibly wrong about.

That was the explanation. That was the logical explanation. She was selecting it.

She kept walking. Elara kept pace beside her. The silence between them was the loudest silence Serena had ever shared with another human being, and the loudness was made of everything neither of them was saying, and the everything was shaped differently in each of their heads but pointed at the same person.

They entered the main gallery. The stone cooled around them. The light shifted from outdoor sun to indoor torch. Serena’s breathing was leveling. Her heart rate was stabilizing. Her brain was filing the scent and the word and the three under a folder labeled “necklace aftereffects” and the folder was going into a drawer and the drawer was going to stay closed.

Footsteps sounded behind them.

Dexmon and Gavriel entered the gallery a few seconds later, their voices low, Dex’s laugh carrying the specific warmth of a man reuniting with his best friend and finding the reunion more restorative than he would ever admit.

“Serena, there you are.”

The voice came from the left corridor. Precise. Bright. Carrying the exact temperature of a woman who had been searching for someone and whose searching was about to produce a conversation that had been planned in advance and rehearsed to perfection.

Bellatrix Drakenfell emerged from the corridor with the composed stride of a queen whose presence was a gift the hallway had done nothing to earn.

She looked at Serena. Looked at Elara. Smiled.

The smile was warm. The smile was genuine. The smile was the smile of a mother-in-law who had absolutely been told to fuck off in a public corridor yesterday and had decided, with the strategic grace of a woman playing chess on a board only she could see, that yesterday had never happened.

“I was looking for you both,” Bellatrix said. “I have the most wonderful idea.”