Evan's POV
The cannery is louder than I've ever heard it, and under the roar of the crowd I can smell them now, the wolves, threaded through the human mass like wire through cloth, and I understand exactly how many of Cass's people are here to watch me die.
I hold the wolf as I walk in. That's the whole of my focus, the thing I've practiced all day, keeping him up and present and mine, the rein taut in my hands. He wants to rise at the smell of the others, wants to meet the threat the way wolves do, and I hold him, steady, not buried, not loose, and I feel him settle into the holding the way he's learned to today, trusting me for the first time in three years. We do this together, I tell him. You lend me what you are. I keep us whole. And he settles, and we walk to the ring as one thing,
