Nothing kills a moment like accusing someone you love of harboring a traitor.
The closed pack meeting convened that evening, smaller and far more tense than the council chamber gathering weeks earlier — only the pack's most trusted ranked members this time, the doors locked, the discussion, by necessity, far more brutal than anything meant for wider ears. Killian, still recovering, had been carried in on a stretcher at his own insistence, refusing to be left out of a conversation that concerned the very rescue that had nearly killed him.
I'd changed out of my blood-stained clothes but hadn't managed to fully wash the morning off me, not really — the smell of it still seemed to cling to my skin no matter how hard I'd scrubbed, a phantom reminder of everything that had happened before the
