The months that followed were busy.
Not with battles. Not with crises. With something harder — and more important.
Building.
Ryder helped. He brought supplies, workers, ideas. Shadow Pine's ancient traditions included ways of caring for children that no one else remembered. Ways that had been lost to generations of war and politics and neglect. He showed them how to build shelters that felt like homes, how to create routines that provided security without becoming prisons. His people knew things about healing that the modern packs had forgotten. They taught the rescued children how to garden, how to cook, how to do simple things that the compound had never allowed. Every child learned to grow something — a tomato plant, a patch of herbs, a flower in a windowsill. Something to nurture. S
