Ravenna
I could not sleep.
I lay in my bed for three hours while the house went quiet around me, listening to the settling sounds of a building at night, and I turned Nyx's word over in my head until the edges of it wore smooth. Mate. It sat in the center of me with the weight of something that had been true for a very long time and had only now been allowed into the room.
At two in the morning, I got up and opened my laptop.
I was careful. I did not use the pack databases, which would have left a record on the family network that Ryder's technical staff would eventually find. I used an academic archive instead, one I had found weeks ago while looking up something about wolf genetics and had bookmarked without fully knowing why. Old texts digitized for historical research. No login req
