By the third month of her life at Ashwood, Wren had started noticing the marks the other camp members carried, the visible ones and the invisible ones both, and understood slowly that the entire camp was built from wolves who had each survived some version of what had nearly killed her.
“Everyone here has a story,” Marta told her, during one of the quiet evening hours the old healer had taken to spending with Wren, ostensibly to check on her continued recovery but increasingly, Wren suspected, simply for the company. “Some wear theirs openly, the way Tessa does with her hand. Others keep them buried so deep you’d never know to look unless you’d learned to recognize the particular way a person flinches at certain sounds, certain gestures, certain words.”
“How do you learn to recognize tha
