We sat in one of the palace’s smaller meeting rooms with the door closed, and I listened to Alpha Cade tell me about his grandmother with the particular careful attention of someone who understood they were hearing something important and did not want to miss any of it.
Her name had been Eira. She had been born in the southern territories in the year the records showed the moon-born bloodline ending, which was not a coincidence; she had ended the records herself. She had understood, by the time she was thirty, that being the only known moon-born healer made her a resource rather than a person in the eyes of the packs that surrounded her, and she had made the pragmatic decision that being believed dead was preferable to being perpetually available.
She had gone north. She had lived quietl
