Arthur's POV
The dining room sat in ringing silence. Down the corridor, Catherine's howling thinned to a wet, hitching gasp and died.
I did not turn toward the sound. My eyes stayed on the woman my three sons had buried behind their bodies.
Sixty-eight years. Neither I nor my wolf has ever misread a scent.
The girl who had walked into my house under the name Alice did not smell like a liar. She smelled of my three sons, layered with a perfume that cost more than a junior associate's salary. Underneath all of it, faint as the first whisper of spring after a long winter, lay something else. I had been worrying that scent like a loose tooth all evening.
It was only when Catherine launched herself across the table that the memory finally surfaced and named itself.
Cold iron and cedar. Da
