… ✦ …
Riven works for someone older than the Blackrock pack and more patient than anyone I've ever met. That's not comfort. That's a warning.
I had him by the collar and he was not afraid.
That was the thing that registered first … not what he'd said, not the word acquiring still sitting cold in my chest, but the fact that his hands were loose at his sides and his pulse, visible at his throat, was even. He was looking at me the way you look at something you've already accounted for.
I did not release him.
"Talk," I said.
He talked.
The Voidfang Clan had no pack territory, no Alpha lineage, no seat at any council. What they had was time. Centuries of it, spent watching bloodlines the way a scholar watches a long experiment … patient, methodical, interested in outcomes rather than all
