Riven's Pov
Crossing into council territory felt different.
Not physically. The trees were the same trees, the ground the same ground, the night the same kind of cold. But something changed in the quality of the air once we crossed the unmarked boundary, a weight that did not have a name exactly, more like a pressure behind the eyes, the particular heaviness of a place where a great many serious decisions had been made over a very long time.
I had been in a lot of places. I had run operations in neutral territory, in hostile pack land, in the grey zones that existed between every boundary line on every map. This was different from all of those. This land belonged to the institution that had shaped every aspect of wolf society for a hundred years, every law, every hierarchy, every quiet
