Rain turned the pack house quieter than usual, not because wolves stopped moving, but because stone swallowed sound when it was damp and the air grew heavy with scent. Everything carried further on days like this. Every trail lingered. Every stranger's trace clung to bark and cloth and skin, and Sable felt it more sharply than she wanted to admit.
She woke twice in the early hours to nothing more than the distant shift of boots in the corridor, then lay still until the sound passed, her body tense and listening in a way that made it difficult to slip back into sleep. Each time she resettled, her hands found Cassian without thinking, not in a needy way, but in the same instinctive way a wolf checked that a boundary still existed. Cassian responded without fully waking, an arm tightening around her waist, a low sound in his throat that wasn't words and didn't need to be.
