Flashback continues...

Kira was halfway to the door of Sasha’s hospital room when a thought stopped her cold.

Sasha had said Ruby held secrets over almost everyone in the pack. The elite women, the staff, goddess knew who else. Which meant Ruby still had hands she could reach with, even from confinement. People she could press. People she could send.

If Sasha had served her purpose, Ruby would want her silenced. Permanently, and bury the truth for good.

Kira turned back.

"We’re moving you and Jerry out of this room tonight," she said.

"If Ruby thinks you’ve outlived your usefulness, she’ll come for you. But if she really is that predictable..." A small smile touched her mouth. "Then let her try. Every move she makes is another piece of evidence she hands us."

A few minutes later, Kira, Nana and Sasha were folded into the back seat of an SUV, and Kira was quietly filling Nana in on everything.

Nana listened to all of it without interrupting. When Kira finished, the old woman leaned toward the front of the car.

"You will not breathe a word of this journey to anyone," she told the driver and the guards. "Not even to the King. If I hear otherwise, you will all be looking for new work by morning."

The men nodded quickly, eyes straight ahead.

The car eventually rolled to a stop at the foot of the woods on the outskirts of Dravengard. The gammas stepped out first, scanning the area before helping Nana and Kira down onto the uneven ground.

Sasha got out and walked ahead of them, deeper toward the trees.

The followed at a reasonable distance.

A patch of earth shifted, then lifted, and Lara crawled out of a concealed dugout. She blinked at the figures approaching, and the moment she recognised Nana and the Queen she tried to scramble straight back into the hole.

"It’s alright," Kira called, raising both hands. "You’re safe. We haven’t come to harm you."

Lara stopped, half in and half out of the ground, her eyes darting between them. "What are you doing here?"

Kira smiled. "I’m here to make you an offer. Help us, and I’ll see to it personally that you get your son back."

End of flashback...

The entire hall was silent as Kira finished telling her story.

Not a whisper. Not a shifting foot. Every pack member sat frozen, hanging on the last of her words.

Kira walked up to the row of elder wolves and placed a small microchip into the lead elder’s hand.

"Footage," she said simply, "of the gamma Ruby sent to kill Sasha in her hospital room last night."

Kira had arranged it. She had told the gammas posted outside Sasha’s son’s room to cooperate with her and pretend to sleep, and Ruby walked her little assassin straight into the trap. She always was predictable."

Ruby’s chest heaved. Her eyes burned across the hall at Kira, fury rolling off her now in waves she could no longer contain. She could not believe how thoroughly the wolfless runt had outsmarted her.

"Can you not all see this?" she shouted, turning desperately to the benches. "These are lies! Fabrications! Every one of them invented to ruin me!" She looked desperately around the room for support.

Kira smiled, lifted one hand, and snapped her fingers.

The doors at the back of the hall opened.

Ishita was wheeled in by her daughter, sitting upright, alert, her eyes fixed straight ahead on the trial box.

Ruby’s face went slack.

"Hello, Miss Ruby," Ishita said with a pleasant smile.

"She remembers nothing!" Ruby’s voice cracked into something close to a shriek. "Look at her, all of you! This malicious queen has bought these low lives to turn every one of you against me!"

"Oh, do stop shouting, Miss Ruby." Ishita’s voice was calm and almost bored. "It is exhausting."

She folded her hands in her lap. "I pretended I could not remember anything because I knew that the moment Miss Ruby believed I had my memory back, she would try to silence me again. So I let everyone think the accident had taken it."

The hall erupted in murmurs, people exchanged glances.

"After Miss Ruby gave me that herb," Ishita continued, "I worked out what it actually was. And I knew the King would want proof, because the King always wants proof. So I bought my own small camera and I hid it in the royal kitchen."

She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and produced a tiny chip, passing it to a waiting gamma, who carried it to the elder wolves.

"I had noticed the kitchen cameras had been tampered with. I was frightened that someone would poison the Queen’s food and that the blame would land on me. So I planted the camera to protect myself, just in case."

She looked directly at the elder wolves. "That chip holds the recording of the night Miss Ruby cornered me in the kitchen, right after I had almost told the King what she was planning. The very next morning, I went to the market for ingredients, and a car struck me down and drove away without stopping."

Lara stepped forward next.

"After the Queen’s Blessing ceremony," she said, her voice steady, "when I was captured and locked in the dungeons, Sasha came to me in secret. She brought a herb that stopped my heart for a few minutes."

"She told me Ruby had set me up to take the fall, and that Ruby would have me killed to bury the trail. She said it would be safer to fake my death, escape, and one day come back to tell the truth."

Lara looked around the silent hall. "So that is what I did."

Then Sasha stepped forward and placed her phone into the lead elder’s hands.

"Everything you need is on there," she said. "Recordings. Videos I captured myself. Proof of what Ruby has been doing in this pack for years."

She drew a breath. "She set Lara up to poison the Queen’s tea. She killed the maid she used to feed Lady Sandra an aphrodisiac, to keep her quiet. She tried to use Ishita to poison the Queen. All of it. It is on that phone."

The elder wolves connected the chips and the phone to the large screen mounted at the front of the hall.

The footage played.

The hall watched. They watched and they listened, and as Ruby’s own voice filled the room, cold and cruel and entirely without remorse, the murmurs swelled into something louder and uglier.

Gasps. Shouts. Pack members turning to one another with horror written plainly on their faces.

"Lies!" Ruby screamed over it. "It is all lies!"

But nobody was listening to her anymore.

She turned to Derek, and what she found in his face stopped her for a moment. He was staring at her with open disgust, the way a person looked at something they had stepped over in the road.

"You cannot honestly take the word of a wolfless runt over mine," she said, and her voice was beginning to come apart.

She spun back to the hall. "I am Ruby. You have all known me your entire lives. You have known me far longer than you have known this traitor’s daughter—"

But every face in the hall was now staring at her with revulsion and disappointment.

Ruby’s head snapped toward Kira. Her eyes blazed, and beneath her skin her beast strained to surface.

Kira looked back at her, unbothered.

"You’re just too predictable, Ruby," she said quietly. "Today, you have finally met your Waterloo."

Ruby’s hand moved.

The small knife had been slipped to her by the gamma she had been using, hidden until now, and without a single word of warning she launched herself clean out of the trial box and threw herself straight at Kira.

"Then you die with me, you bitch!" she screamed.

It happened too fast for most of the hall to even register. The knife was aimed at Kira’s throat, one clean cut to make sure she would never sit on the throne, since Ruby herself never would.

Connor moved.

He shoved Kira hard out of the knife’s path, and the blade caught him across the shoulder blade instead, as Ruby’s momentum carried her down onto the floor.

"Your Highness." Connor was already turning toward her. "Are you alright?"

Pain shot through Kira’s body from the fall, her cast jarring hard against the ground.

Derek moved like lightning.

He was across the hall before anyone else had fully reacted, barking orders as he went, dropping to lift Kira up off the floor.

"Secure that criminal," he snapped. "Take her to the edge of the woods. She will die by the judgement of her own pack."

Ruby began to scream. "Derek, please! Please, forgive me! I am begging you, I am begging—"

Derek did not look at her. He looked down at Kira in his arms, his voice dropping low and urgent. "Are you hurt? Tell me."

"I’m alright," Kira said. "You can put me down."

He lowered her slowly, carefully, his hands checking her even as he set her on her feet. Jessica hurried to her other side and took her arm, steadying her.

Around them the pack members were already moving toward the doors as the gammas hauled Ruby up in her chains and dragged her, screaming, toward the woods.

At the foot of the trees, the pack had gathered and was waiting. The gammas held Ruby between them.

"Today," Derek said, his voice carrying across the assembled pack, "it falls to you to take the life of someone who is far worse than any traitor."

He let his eyes move across them.

"Anyone who spares her will face something far worse than death."

He turned to Ruby.

"I told you," he said, and his voice was quiet now, only for her.

"I told you that the day I learned you had harmed my Queen, I would forget our friendship and the oath I swore to your brother. Today you have proven exactly what you are. The pack has judged you. I have judged you."

"Derek please! Remember Jasper!" Ruby cried.

He signalled to the gammas.

They released her.

In this execution, the condemned was permitted to run, but only in human form, while the pack hunted. Escape meant being exiled forevet, never to be seen by the pack again. Failure meant being torn apart. No one had ever escaped it.

Ruby ran, stumbling, into the dark of the woods crying.

Derek gave the pack a moment. Then he gave the command.

Every shifter present dropped into their beast at once, fur and bone and muscle erupting in a single wave.

Jessica’s hand tightened hard around Kira’s arm at the sheer force of it. The pack charged into the treeline, a flood of growls and snarls and thundering paws, and was swallowed by the woods.

Kira, Derek, Nana, Declan, Jessica and Kai stood at the foot of the woods and did not move.

For a few seconds there was only the sound of the hunt fading into the trees, and howls erupted.

Then Ruby’s screams rose, high and agonised, somewhere in the woods.

And then, slowly, they stopped as victorious howls filled the air.