For a little while after that, no one said anything.
The forest had gone so still that it no longer felt like silence in the ordinary sense, but like a kind of listening, as if the trees themselves had leaned inward to hear what would happen next. The older wolf remained where he was, steady and unreadable, while Rowan stood beside me with the controlled stillness of someone who had learned long ago how to keep his reactions buried beneath composure.
I should have felt overwhelmed. Instead, I felt strangely clear. Because I understood what was happening to me, and certainly not anything he had said made the path ahead look easier.
But since all of this had begun, I could feel the shape of the real question. It was no longer about whether Kael had been wrong to reject me, or whether Rowan had been right to protect me, or whether Lucien had entered my life as a warning or a threat. All of those things still mattered, but none of them sat at the center anymore.
The center was me.
