The silence after battle is its own kind of violence. I drift somewhere between sleep and waking, every ache in my body a reminder of what I survived and what I still haven’t truly escaped.
I wake before dawn, the sky outside my window streaked with a bruised, purple gray. For a minute, I wonder if the whole Council hearing was a fever dream. But then the dull, persistent throb of the mate bond settles in my chest, dark and relentless, it’s real. It’s all real.
The pack house is quiet this early. I shuffle to the bathroom and stare at my reflection: the faint bruise along my collarbone, courtesy of Asher, already turning yellow at the edges; the new lines around my eyes, the set of my jaw that didn’t exist six months ago. I look both older and younger, a girl learning, all at once, what
