It happened at the river.
Not my river — the public access point at the territory's eastern boundary, the one where the pack ran trail sessions on alternating days. Marcus had been running the morning route alone, which he did when he needed to think, which he needed to do more frequently now that the review board had formally scheduled his testimony and the accounting of what he had known and when was becoming a document with his name on it.
The woman was sitting on the rock at the river bend.
Not a pack member — he would have recognized a pack member's scent from fifty meters. Not a rogue exactly, though she had the specific quality of someone who had not been pack-bonded recently. Something adjacent. The specific quality of someone who moved through the world without the warmth of a
