The scent of pine always brought it back.
Alec closed his eyes, leaning against the cool stone wall of his cell, and let memory take him. Not the pain. Not the shame. Just the quiet ache of things lost too soon.
He was four when the blood came.
He couldn’t remember his mother’s face, not in detail. Just the sound of her humming—a trembling melody as she brushed his hair back from his forehead. Her hands had always been warm. Gentle. She used to say the moon watched over him because he was special.
But the night they died, the moon hid behind clouds.
Flames. Screams. The stench of burning fur. His father’s roar—a sound of defiance and desperation—echoed through the trees, then was silenced, just like that. Alec remembered clutching a tree root, small fingers dug into the earth as if he
