**Savannah’s POV**
The chandeliers cut the ballroom into a thousand pieces of light, and I moved through all of them with the silver hem whispering against the marble floor.
The terrace air had cleared my head.
Not completely, not enough to make me forget the moonlight or the shadows or the silence that had stretched between us on the stone railing — but enough.
I had a child at home and a car in the parking lot and absolutely no reason to stand on a terrace with Declan Voss until the space between us started feeling like something.
I made it approximately forty feet into the ballroom before Celeste materialized from the crowd.
Champagne glass catching the warm light, deep blue gown, that particular smile she’d been wearing since we were teenagers — wide at the front, nothing behind it.
She moved toward me with the ease of someone who had planned the intercept and was pleased with the execution.
“Savannah, darling.” The warmth in her voice was the expensive kind.
Layered, convincing, the product of years of maintenance.
“We really should talk properly.
Clear the air between us.”
I kept my face neutral.
My fingers wanted to curl and I told them not to.
“There’s nothing to clear,” I said.
“That friendship we had.” She tilted her head, the smile holding steady.
“We were so close.
Can’t we find our way back to something like that?”
The word *friendship* from her mouth was like a stone in the throat.
Behind my eyes, the fragments that always lived at the edges of my memory from that night surfaced briefly — the strange taste of the water, the dark of room 302, the sound of her laughing in the parking lot at dawn while my entire world came apart.
“We don’t have anything to talk about,” I said, and turned.
Her hand shot out and closed around my wrist.
The grab was sudden and off-balance, and my glass tilted with the motion — not dropped, just caught wrong, and the red wine went in the only direction gravity allows.
It fell in a slow, wide arc and landed across the front of her ivory gown, blooming outward in the specific, irreversible way that expensive fabric absorbs dark liquid.
Celeste’s scream cut through the nearest section of music.
Conversations stopped.
Heads turned.
“My dress!” The tears arrived with a speed that would have impressed me in other circumstances — precise, immediate, tracking down her cheeks in two controlled lines.
“This was made for tonight.
*Custom.* How could you—”
The crowd was forming the way crowds always form around something — organically, quickly, each person telling themselves they were just passing by.
Then Declan came through the ballroom from the direction of the terrace.
I watched him read the scene in under three seconds — Celeste’s ruined dress, the tears, the positioning, the audience.
His expression didn’t change visibly, but something in his eyes did.
A flicker of something tired.
Celeste’s performance shifted the moment she saw him, seamless as turning a page.
“I was just trying to apologize,” she said, leaning into him, the tears doing exactly what she needed them to do.
“I wanted to make things right.
But Savannah, she’s always so… she just…”
The tableau was a perfect replica of something I’d seen before.
Different room, same architect.
I looked at it for a moment and felt something cold settle into my chest.
Not anger — I’d moved past anger into something cleaner and less forgiving.
“What happened?” Declan came forward.
His amber-brown eyes came to mine, and I heard what was under the neutrality of his voice — the fatigue of a man who has been asked to adjudicate too many times.
“She ruined my dress on purpose,” Celeste said, her voice cracking on the last word with perfect timing.
“I was trying so hard to reconcile—”
I laughed.
One short sound, cold as the stone railing outside.
“Reconcile.
Like you tried to reconcile six years ago, Celeste?
With your fake concern and your perfectly timed tears?”
“Savannah.” Declan’s eyes came back to mine.
Something uncertain moved in them — something that hadn’t been there earlier in the evening.
“Whatever happened between you before, we need basic civility here.”
Celeste pressed herself closer to his arm, rearranging the wine stain with a slight adjustment of her posture like it was a design choice.
“I just miss my best friend,” she said softly, dabbing at her eye with an embroidered handkerchief.
“I just want her back.”
The words detonated something in me.
“Best friend.” The two words came out hard enough that the wolves nearest to us physically shifted.
“Were you thinking about your best friend when you sent that message?
When you watched me walk into what you’d set up?” I looked at her directly, all the way through the performance to the person running it.
“Or when you stood in that parking lot watching everything I had collapse, and you *smiled*?”
The whispers started immediately.
“Unstable—” “Did you hear what she just—” “No wonder she was exiled—”
Declan raised one hand.
The whispers stopped.
“Savannah, please—”
“Don’t.” I cut him off.
“Don’t ask me for civility while she’s standing right there lying to your face.”
Something moved in his expression.
He took a breath.
“Then help me understand.
Because what I’m seeing right now—”
“Is exactly what she wants you to see.” I looked between them.
“A perfect victim.
A wounded friend.” I met Declan’s eyes directly.
“Tell me something.
Has she always been able to cry on command like that?
Or is that a skill she developed specifically for you?”
“One apology ends this,” he said.
But his voice had shifted — the certainty from earlier, I noted, was thinner now.
I lifted my chin.
The silver dress held me upright in the way that Leo had probably intended, and I was grateful for it, because the alternative was to say every true thing I had been carrying for six years in the middle of this ballroom floor.
“No,” I said.
The room pulled in a collective breath.
Nobody refused Iron Ridge’s heir.
That was just understood.
Declan stepped forward, and his presence filled the space between us — that Alpha quality that reorganized the air around it without asking.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
“Harder.” I almost laughed again.
“You want to talk about hard?
Try being poisoned.
Try being betrayed by the person you trusted most.
Try being exiled from your own pack with nothing and rebuilding yourself from zero while raising a child alone.” My voice dropped to its lowest register, the one that didn’t need volume to carry.
“Try watching someone cry those perfect tears while they hand your entire life over to a lie.
*That’s* hard, Declan.
What I’m doing right now is just telling the truth.”
Celeste’s mask cracked.
Just for a fraction of a second, just in the space behind her eyes, something real and frightened looked out.
Good.
Let her remember who she was looking at now.
“You can’t speak to him like that,” she said, her grip on his arm tightening, voice recovering.
“He’s Iron Ridge’s heir—”
“And you’re still hiding behind someone else’s authority.” I looked at her with the specific kind of calm that comes after you’ve run out of anything left to lose.
“Some things never change, do they, Celeste?”
I turned.
Walked toward the exit at the same pace I’d walked in.
Even.
Deliberate.
Each step landing exactly where I chose to put it.
“If you’ll both excuse me,” I said, without turning back, “I have a child at home who actually deserves my attention.”