Lenora's POV
The journey back took three days.
I spent most of it in my own head — reading the suppression order repeatedly, working out its implications, tracing the forty-year arc of what it meant.
Seven families. Each one identified by bloodline characteristic — the old pack records used physical descriptions coded to lineage: specific eye colors, bone structure, scent markers that had been observed to run in certain ancestral lines. The description applied to my family's line.
The other six families had been identified, individually suppressed, and denied pack status or territory affiliation for forty years. Their children and grandchildren had been born into the unclaimed territories. They had lived outside the pack structure for two generations in some cases.
Not because they ha
