Cassandra's POV
He took me to the ridge on the north side of the pack grounds and I understood why the moment I saw it.
The path up to it was narrow and quiet, threading through trees old enough that their roots had broken through the surface of the ground in thick, gnarled waves that you had to step over or around, and the walk took about twenty minutes at the easy pace Sebastian set.
He talked during the walk in a way I had not heard him talk before, not about strategy or pack politics or the careful management of difficult situations, but about history. He told me about his father, who had been a formidable Alpha by all accounts but a difficult man, which Sebastian said without bitterness, simply as a fact he had made peace with over time.
He told me about the founding of this terri
