I realised I was being watched long before I understood what that meant.
It wasn’t the kind of watching the pack had done — hungry, fearful, calculating. This was different. Subtle. Constant. Like a presence that never pressed too close but never truly left either.
At first, I told myself it was paranoia.
After everything I’d endured, fear made sense. My body was still adjusting to whatever had changed inside me, my senses sharpened in reminders that came without warning — the snap of a twig too far away to have mattered before, the faint scent of rain hours before the clouds gathered.
But even as I tried to dismiss it, the feeling persisted.
I wasn’t alone.
I moved cautiously through the forest, following the river’s slow bend north. The land here felt older, heavier with memory. Tr
