POV: Liam
Cole was already in the building. I felt it before I saw it, the particular pressure of an Alpha presence that was not mine moving through a space I had always understood as neutral ground. It had a quality to it that was different from my father’s authority, different from Maren’s settled weight. This was something that had been sharpened by a decade of grievance into something narrow and extremely deliberate.
I came through the gym corridor on a run and stopped.
Cole Ashwood was standing in the main hallway outside the gym entrance, flanked by two wolves I did not recognize, dressed like someone who had planned to be somewhere ordinary tonight. Dark jacket, plain shirt, hands loose at his sides. He looked like a man in his mid-thirties who spent a lot of time outdoors and
