Serena:
The morning lesson felt like punishment.
The instructor stood at the front of the concubine hall, writing phrases on the digital board while the other women copied them into neat notebooks.
The lesson was the language of wolves: phrases, gestures, titles, the small rules that kept a wolf’s world ordered and predictable. In Petrova territory, a single wrong word could cost you more than pride. It could cost you safety.
I already knew the language. I had grown up with it in the corners of my childhood home, my mother muttering it when she was angry, my father using it to speak around humans without being understood. I had spoken it once, too, before I learned that anything tied to being a wolf had to be buried if I wanted to survive.
The instructor asked, “If a ranked wolf says
