The temple ruins offered a strange kind of peace over the following two days, a fragile bubble of calm carved out of ancient stone while riders from both packs maintained careful watch beyond its boundary, and Cole worked tirelessly through contacts old and new trying to trace exactly who had led the compound assault and where the stolen ritual pages might have ended up.
Ronan and I found ourselves with unexpected pockets of quiet during those days, moments that felt stolen from the chaos surrounding us, and I treasured them with an intensity that surprised me given everything still hanging unresolved.
We sat together on the temple's crumbling steps that second evening, watching the sun set through ancient trees, and for a while neither of us spoke, simply existing in each other's compan
