The morning after the reaffirmation ceremony, Silvercrest Pack woke to something it hadn’t experienced in years—genuine lightness. Not the forced normalcy that had characterized the pack’s existence under Dorian’s manipulation, not the brittle relief of immediate crisis survived, but something quieter and more substantial. The particular ease of a community that had witnessed something true the night before and was still carrying its warmth.
Sera felt it through the alpha bond the moment she woke. Three hundred individual connections, all of them clearer than they’d been even the previous day, as though the ceremony had polished something that exhaustion and ongoing threat had kept dull. She lay still for a moment, eyes closed, simply feeling the texture of her pack’s collective emotional
