The days were growing shorter, and with each passing sunrise, I felt the tension in the pack rising. It wasn’t just the usual challenges of maintaining order or keeping the rogues at bay—there was something else, something more primal lingering in the air. I could sense it in the way the wolves moved, in the whispers that spread through the halls of the pack house.
And then, there was Carter.
He had always been strong, but now there was something undeniably different about him. Watching him spar this morning had been… eye-opening. The way he moved—faster, sharper, more precise—was beyond anything I’d seen from a human. His instincts were honing themselves, and the mark was clearly doing its work, accelerating his adaptation to our world.
But this transformation, this blending of human a
