Cassandra's POV
It started the way bad things usually do. Quietly.
I had gone to the garden to think. That was all. The pack grounds had pockets of stillness if you knew where to find them and the garden on the south side was one of those, shielded from the main training areas and most of the daily pack movement. I had taken to going there in the afternoons when the walls of the house felt too close.
Claire was already there.
She was sitting on one of the stone benches near the rosebushes, which I found out later were her favourite, which would have been useful information to have beforehand. She looked at me when I came through the hedge gap and something in her expression settled into something cold and decided.
"I was wondering when you would wander out here alone," she said.
I st
