Lucious sat silently across from me, his expression thoughtful. "You speak of them with surprising...restraint. If what you've told me is true, they kept you isolated and weak for years."
"They did," I admitted. "But they were also pawns in a larger game, just as we were. The true enemy was always the Northern Alliance."
"The people who raised me," he said quietly.
I leaned forward, choosing my words carefully. "The people who stole you from our family and tried to turn you into something you're not."
He nodded, his fingers unconsciously touching our mother's pendant around his neck. "The Priestess showed me our family tree yesterday. Seventeen generations of Blackthornes, all the way back to the founding of Shadowmoon Pack."
"What did you think?" I asked.
"It made everything more re
