Caelum's POV
The grave is newer than it should look, the earth still dark and unsettled, no grass yet grown over to soften the fact of it. I stand at the foot of it longer than I mean to, hands loose at my sides, the way I used to stand before council sessions when I was still young enough to be nervous about them.
Fen served three Alphas before me. My father used to say the old elder had a mind like a locked room; you could talk at him for an hour and never know what he was keeping filed away behind that quiet, unreadable face. I always assumed that was simply his temperament. I never once considered it might be caution.
“Ruled an accident.”
I've read the report four times since it crossed my desk. A fall, on stairs he'd climbed daily for thirty years, in a home he knew better than h
