He didn't send another envoy.
He came himself.
I was in the herb garden with Maren when the alarm went through the compound — not a siren, not anything that loud. Just a shift in the air pressure, a collective tensing that moved through every wolf on the property like a current through water. Heads lifted. Conversations stopped mid-sentence. The training yard went silent.
Maren set down her bundle of stems and looked at me with those fog-gray eyes and said, simply, "Stay here."
I did not stay there.
I followed the current of tension to the compound's main gate — stone pillars, iron latticework, the Blackthorn crest cut deep into the arch above — and I stopped at the edge of the gathering crowd because I understood instinctively that walking to the front was not mine to do. Not yet. No
