The training ground had gone completely still.
Not the stillness of a drill or a pause between forms. The stillness of twenty-three wolves who have all registered something wrong at the same moment and are waiting for their Alpha to tell them what to do with it.
Caden had not told them anything yet.
He stood beside me with his hands at his sides and his face giving nothing away and his not-moving had the specific quality I had learned to read in the weeks since the river, the quality of a man containing something very large behind an expression built to contain large things. I had seen it at the hearing. I had seen it when Gerald arrived at the gate. I had seen it at three in the morning through a door.
I had not seen it quite like this.
Because this was not Gerald. This was not Crane
