The pain came at three in the morning. It came every night now at three.
Kael had stopped fighting it. The first three nights he had sat up and pressed his fist to his sternum and breathed through it the way you breathed through training pain — controlled, systematic, telling himself it was biological residue, chemical, a nervous system winding down from an attachment that had been severed.
He had believed that for three nights.
On the fourth night the pain had been bad enough that he'd gotten up and walked the territory perimeter in the dark, two miles through frost and dead pines, and had arrived back at the Alpha house no calmer than when he left, and had stood at the kitchen window watching the first pale line of dawn and understood something he had been refusing to understand.
The
