Ellie POV
Cassian didn’t waste time with pleasantries.
He stood in the sitting room of the Silver Fang packhouse, hands clasped behind his back, his posture rigid in a way I recognized immediately. This wasn’t the Cassian who teased the boys or argued politics over breakfast.
This was the enforcer. The strategist. The man who had kept me alive when everything else was falling apart.
Rae sat beside him, her expression tight, eyes sharp as they tracked every movement in the room.
Nolan lingered near the doorway, deliberately casual but coiled beneath the surface. I could feel his attention on me like a living thing, steady and protective, even as he pretended to examine a crack in the stone wall.
“What’s wrong?” I asked quietly.
Cassian met my gaze. “We caught Claire.”
The words lan
