Everything else looked the same. The trees looked the same. The dirt under her boots looked the same. But her chest carried a hollow that hadn't been there three days ago, and that hollow was the only thing she trusted anymore.
She walked until the trees thinned, and thinning trees meant a border, and a border meant a choice already half-made. South held people who might remember her — a Beta who owed her mother a debt he'd never called in, an Alpha's mate who'd sat beside her at three different Councils, back when sitting beside Ivy meant something. South held the temptation to trade on a name that had gotten her exiled in the first place. She'd already weighed it, back at the tree line, and already turned away from it.
West held nothing she could name. That was still the whole point.
