Lena came back on a Wednesday.
No announcement. No forewarning in the diplomatic sense that a formal visit would have required. She simply appeared at the pack house at half past ten in the morning in a car that she parked with the particular confidence of someone who had grown up treating other people's driveways as their own, which she had, because her father was Beta of this pack and Beta daughters of small packs occupied a specific social position that was just powerful enough to make them dangerous and just insecure enough to make them cruel.
I heard the car from the kitchen.
I did not need to look out the window to know who it was. I knew the sound of that engine the way I knew every recurring sound in this house, by the specific memory of what it had preceded in the past, and wha
