POV: Maya
Isla's car was a grey sedan that smelled like pine air freshener and old coffee. She had parked behind the grocery store on Clement Street, away from school traffic, away from anyone who might walk past and interrupt. She had chosen the spot deliberately. I understood, watching her scan the surrounding area before she even turned the engine off, that Isla did everything deliberately.
She talked for forty minutes without stopping, I listened. She laid it out in clean, ordered sections, the way someone talked when they had rehearsed the information so many times it had lost its emotional charge. The blood seal. What it was, what it did, how my mother and Soren had constructed it together in the first days after I was born.
My half-wolf genetics sat underneath it for seventeen y
