POV: Isla Vane
I had been preparing for this moment since I was nine years old. That was the age I was when my mother sat me down at our kitchen table in the small house we rented on the outskirts of a town three provinces away and told me about Edric. Not the soft version, not the version adjusted for a child's understanding. The full version. She believed children deserved the truth, my mother. She said softened truths grew into confused adults.
So I learned it all at nine. My uncle Edric, the best of us, left because he loved the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. A daughter left behind, sealed and hidden, growing up in Millfield without knowing what she carried in her blood. An Alpha who signed an execution order and went back to his desk and called it pack governance
