The purge was swift and silent. In the hours before dawn, while the pack slept, Selene and a handpicked team of Borin’s most trusted warriors moved through the Keep like ghosts. They pulled two sentries from their posts, a cook’s assistant from the kitchens, and a junior clerk from the records room. There was no struggle, no public spectacle. They simply disappeared into the dungeons, their betrayal erased from the daily life of the pack as cleanly as a surgeon excises a cancer.
By the time the sun rose, the only evidence of the night’s work was a new, steely resolve in the eyes of those in the know, and a palpable sense of a threat neutered. The air in the Keep felt cleaner, lighter, as if a poison had been drawn from a wound.
I stood on the battlements with Kaelen and Darius, watching
