Aldric talked until the tea went cold twice.
He was not a man who wasted words. Every sentence he produced had been considered before it arrived, the habit of someone who had spent decades in rooms where the wrong word cost something real. But he had clearly been holding a great deal back for a very long time and the presence of Liam in his doorway at midnight had opened something that needed to come out before morning.
He talked about the pack.
About the six years since Kade had taken the Alpha position and the slow deliberate way fear had replaced loyalty as the primary motivating force in every quarter of the compound. About the pack members who had served under Alaric and who had transferred that service to Kade because the alternative was exile or worse. About the ones who had stay
