Trishelle’s POV

Two months was long enough for things to feel almost normal.

Not normal in the way other people’s lives were normal. She wasn’t naive about that. The basement was still the basement. The work was still the work. She still woke up before four every morning and went to bed after ten most nights and spent the hours between almost entirely in the service of a pack that had spent twenty years making clear she was the lowest thing in it.

But the edges had changed.

Her name was her name now. Universally, consistently, without exception. She’d stopped bracing for the other one about three weeks in, when it became clear it wasn’t coming back. The forty-minute window after lunch was real and reliable and she’d started using it to actually eat, properly, sitting down, which was still a strange enough sensation that she sometimes just sat there for the first five minutes adjusting to the concept of stillness.

The doctor had seen her twice more, once for a small burn from the stove that she would previously have just wrapped in a clean cloth and ignored, and once for a persistent cough she’d had for ten days. Both times he’d been matter-of-fact and unhurried. Both times she’d left with something that actually helped.

She was eating enough that her clothes fit differently. She’d noticed it first in the mirror, then in the way the green dress sat on her when she finally wore it to the garden. Fuller in the face. Softer at the waist. Like her body was slowly remembering that it was supposed to have reserves.

She didn’t let herself think too hard about what had changed or why. Thinking too hard about it felt like looking directly at something that might disappear if she paid too much attention.

James was still watching her at meals. She’d stopped pretending she didn’t notice.

She didn’t know what to do with it so she did nothing, which was her default position on things she couldn’t control or understand. She kept her head down and did her work and let the information accumulate without drawing conclusions from it.

It was the safest approach she knew.

Richard’s POV

Richard had been patient, which was not his natural state, but he’d learned that the best plans needed time to become invisible.

He’d spent the first two weeks after his conversation with James identifying the right resource. Sabrina, the Gamma’s mate, was well known among the female pack members for her knowledge of herbs and remedies. She was discreet, practical, and had been helping wolves with cycle-related issues for years in both this pack and her previous one. She wasn’t a bad person. Richard had always liked her well enough.

He’d approached her carefully, framing it as a favor, a way to help a young omega who hadn’t yet come into her natural cycle. Sabrina had been hesitant at first. She’d asked questions. He’d answered them in the way that produced the impression he wanted rather than the full picture, and eventually she’d agreed, because she thought she was helping.

Richard was good at making people think they were helping.

The herb Sabrina had identified worked specifically on omegas who hadn’t yet reached their first heat. It wouldn’t force anything that wasn’t already building naturally. It would just, as Sabrina put it, accelerate the timeline. Move things along. A small dose in something she ate or drank, and within a few hours the process would begin.

An omega in heat was different from a she-wolf in heat. More intense. More urgent. And critically, given what Richard had worked out about Trishelle’s biology, it would register to every unmated male in proximity as something significantly harder to ignore than normal attraction.

He wasn’t doing this for James. He wanted to be honest with himself about that, at least in private. He was doing this because he’d looked at Trishelle properly for the first time two months ago and hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her since, and because he understood that the direct approach was never going to work, not with her, not in this pack, not while James was circling her like a satellite that couldn’t decide whether to land.

But heat was different. Heat changed the math.

He’d told James enough of the plan to get the party approved and the night organized. He hadn’t told him all of it.

That was fine. Some details were better managed quietly.

He was doing the herb preparation himself, from Sabrina’s instructions, mixing it into a tea blend that he’d pass to one of the kitchen omegas to prepare. Untraceable. Unremarkable. Just tea at a party.

He looked at the preparations taking shape in the training yard and felt the particular satisfaction of a man whose plan was finally ready.

Two months of patience. Worth it.