I looked at the healer for a long moment.
I thought about thirteen years of being told my wolf was dormant. Thirteen years of pack members looking at me with the specific pity reserved for the incomplete, the broken, the ones who had simply never received the full inheritance everyone else around them took for granted. Thirteen years of Gerald using my suppression as proof of my inadequacy, the evidence he kept returning to whenever he needed to remind me of my place in his house.
I thought about what it would have meant, at seven, or ten, or fifteen, to know the truth. To know my wolf was not broken. Was suppressed. Was being held back by something real and nameable and entirely outside my control.
I thought about what that knowledge would have changed.
Then I thought about what I had
