Anna's POV
The thing that nearly breaks us doesn't come from Cass.
It comes from inside, the way the worst things do, and it comes because we're both exhausted and frightened and stretched too thin, and because there's a piece of this Evan has been carrying that he hasn't told me, and when it finally comes out it comes out wrong, and for one terrible night I think I've lost him.
It starts with the arranged mate.
I've known about her since the cliff, in the abstract, the she-wolf the pack chose for Evan, the political match made before he was old enough to speak. I filed her away as one more piece of the machinery, one more thing Cass holds over him, and I didn't think much more about it, because there was always something more urgent, the drug, the deadline, the plan. But she's real, a
