Silence had weight.
Lila learned that in the days after.
It pressed against her chest when she woke. It followed her through the den like a second shadow. It filled the spaces where sound should have lived—Caleb’s voice, the soft murmur of pack life, the heartbeat she no longer felt beneath her ribs.
The healer said her body would recover.
Her wolf would too, eventually.
No one spoke about the other kind of damage.
Lila lay on her side, staring at the stone wall, one hand resting where her belly had already begun to flatten again. The ache there was strange—less physical now, more like memory. Like her body remembered something her arms had never held.
Caleb sat nearby, unmoving, as if the slightest shift might shatter what little peace remained.
He had not left her side.
Not once
