By the time dawn began to pale the sky beyond Grimridge's ridgeline, the pack house had already absorbed the night's arrest the way it absorbed everything that threatened its structure: quietly, efficiently, without turning it into gossip.
Lysander's absence would be noticed, but Cassian had built the kind of authority that didn't require explanation for every missing piece, and wolves who understood survival knew better than to ask the wrong questions too loudly.
Sable slept in fragments.
It wasn't fear that kept waking her, not exactly. It was the constant sharpened awareness that came with being watched, the sensation of invisible attention pressing against the edges of her day until even rest felt like a risk. Twice she woke with her hand on the door latch without remembering reaching for it. Once she woke to the low scrape of wood against stone and realized she had shifted the chair again in her sleep, angling it in a way that forced interruption into anyone's path.
