The queen was back at it.

Twenty-four hours ago, Serena had told this woman to fuck off in a public hallway. Twelve hours ago, this woman had fainted with the theatrical precision of a stage actress hitting her mark.

This woman had presumably woken up, assessed the damage, recalculated her entire strategy, and decided that the optimal play was to pretend none of it happened and arrive fresh with a “wonderful idea” and a smile that could charm the skin off a snake.

It was funny, really. In the way that a building fire is funny when you’re watching it from across the street and the building belongs to your employer.

“I was looking for you both,” Bellatrix repeated, her smile widening to include Elara in the radius of warmth, because Bellatrix never forgot to include the Beta Luna in her charm offensives.

Damn straight. This Beta Luna was the gatekeeper to the princess and gatekeepers required maintenance.

Elara was preparing her response. A polite deflection, a redirect, a “Your Grace, we were just heading to” followed by a location that was anywhere other than here.

Then she saw Serena freeze.

Board-stiff. Every muscle locked. Her spine went vertical so fast it looked corrective, like an invisible hand had grabbed her by the back of the neck and pulled her upright.

Her nostrils flared. Once. Wide.

The involuntary intake of a wolf catching a scent her body had opinions about, and the opinions were arriving at a volume her composure was scrambling to contain.

Dexmon and Gavriel had just entered the gallery.

Their footsteps echoed off the stone. Dex’s voice was mid-sentence, something to Gavriel about the coma, the tone easy, warm, the register of a prince talking to his Gamma like the last few weeks hadn’t happened.

Thank the gods.

Gavriel’s response was too low to catch, but the cadence was casual, practiced, the Gavriel Sterling Autopilot of charm and deflection running at full power.

Both of them were behind Serena. Both of their scents were in the air. The gallery was enclosed, stone-walled and poorly ventilated, and the poor ventilation meant scents lingered. The concentrated air was doing Serena absolutely zero favors.

Serena’s nostrils flared again. Her jaw tightened. A muscle in her neck twitched.

Elara’s brain executed a threat assessment in under two seconds.

Bellatrix was standing eight feet away with her smile and her wonderful idea. Bellatrix, whose primary hobby was collecting information about Serena Frostborne and weaponizing it at strategic intervals.

Bellatrix, who had called Serena a harlot on multiple occasions and whose vocabulary for women with complicated mate situations was colorful and cruel and always delivered with impeccable timing.

If Serena reacted to Gavriel’s scent right now, in this gallery, in front of this woman, the reaction would be catalogued, analyzed, and deployed at the worst possible moment.

Bellatrix would see the freeze, the flared nostrils, the stiffness, and Bellatrix would know, because Bellatrix was a predator whose prey was social vulnerability and whose hunting instincts were sharper than any wolf’s.

Everything Bellatrix had called Serena, every accusation about harlotry and loose morals and a woman who collected mates like accessories, would become retroactively true in the queen’s mind. The satisfaction would feed her for months. The ammunition would last years.

Absolutely the fuck not. Over Elara’s dead body and several of Bellatrix’s.

Elara opened her mouth to intervene, to say something, to create a diversion, to knock a vase off a table if she had to, anything to give Serena three seconds of cover.

“Sure,” Serena said. “I’ll go with you.”

The words came out level. Calm. Measured. Delivered with the precise vocal control of a woman who was forcing composure through her throat like pushing a boulder uphill and whose uphill was vertical and whose boulder was a third matebond scent.

Elara could see the effort. The effort was visible in the set of Serena’s shoulders, in the controlled rhythm of her breathing, in the way her hands hung at her sides without clenching because clenching would be visible and visible was dangerous and dangerous was Bellatrix’s territory.

Serena stepped forward, toward Bellatrix, away from the scent, away from the gallery where two men were walking closer and the closer was making the air thicker and the thicker was making her composure more expensive by the second.

Bellatrix’s smile brightened. The brightening was genuine, delighted, the smile of a woman whose daughter-in-law had just agreed to spend time with her voluntarily and whose voluntary was a victory she was already adding to the mental scoreboard.

“Wonderful,” Bellatrix said. “Elara, you too, of course. This involves both of you.”

Of course it did.

Elara fell into step beside Serena. Their shoulders were close. Close enough for Elara to feel the tension radiating off her best friend’s body in waves, the physical output of a woman holding herself together with discipline and denial and the sheer refusal to fall apart in front of the one person on this continent who would enjoy watching her do it.

This whole thing would be funny if it wasn’t, a catastrophic, multi-layered, three-matebond, wolf-said-three, scent-on-the-wind, queen-in-the-hallway clusterfuck of genuinely historic proportions.

Elara had been managing secrets since she became Beta Luna.

She had managed military secrets, diplomatic secrets, the kind of secrets that could start wars if they were mishandled and end careers if they were whispered.

This secret was different. This secret belonged to her best friend and involved her best friend’s body and her best friend’s wolf and a man who was her best friend’s mate’s best friend, and the possessive chain in that sentence was long enough to hang all of them.

She needed Serena in a locked room. She needed zero Alphas, zero queens, zero Gavriels, and approximately four uninterrupted hours.

What she had was Bellatrix Drakenfell leading them down a corridor toward a “wonderful idea” while Serena’s composure held by threads and Gavriel’s scent lingered in the gallery behind them like a ghost that refused to leave a room it had every intention of haunting.

Elara followed. Because following was the job. Managing was the job. Keeping the grenades from detonating in public hallways was the job, and the job had never required more hands than it did right now, and Elara Vaelor was running out of hands.