They arrived back at Silverfang on the evening of day twenty-six.
The compound felt the way it always felt when she returned to it now — like a place that was hers, that held her in its architecture, that had space specifically shaped around her presence. She had started noticing this in the second week and had stopped trying to explain it away in the third.
This was home.
The pack registered their return before they were through the gate — word spreading through the yard in the particular fast, quiet way of a pack whose information networks ran on something more efficient than announcement. By the time they crossed the central yard, three of the senior wolves had emerged from the war room and Marta was visible through the kitchen window moving with the purposeful energy of someone who
