Amara's words hadn't finished settling before I heard it — a sound that didn't belong in a clearing this quiet, this deliberately hidden. Branches, moving wrong, too rhythmic to be wind, too many directions at once to be one animal passing through.
"Kael." I didn't have to say more than his name. He'd already turned, already gone still and his demeanor shifting into the version built for exactly this.
"Inside," Marcus said, low and fast, all the weariness gone from his voice in an instant, replaced by something I recognized from every account I'd ever heard of who he used to be before he stepped down as Alpha. "Now. All of you."
Amara didn't argue. She moved for the porch with the economy of someone who'd run from exactly this kind of sound more times than she'd ever wanted to count, an
