By morning the failed interception was already moving through the pack in careful, lowered voices.
No one said the scarred woman had looked me in the face and still escaped. They didn’t need the full detail. They only needed the shape: another night operation, another empty result, another reminder that Selene’s people could still touch the edges of our territory and leave. The quiet arithmetic I had felt since Pell’s death continued. Some of the looks in the corridors were harder than the day before.
I ignored what I could and filed the rest away. Reacting to every shifted glance would only feed the story Selene preferred.
Asher spent the first hours of daylight locked in with Torren and the senior captains, rebuilding the outer patterns around the new information. The scarred woman’s
