NEVA
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I should have known the quiet wouldn't last.
Not because I'm cynical about happiness — I've earned the right, across everything this story has put me through, to actually trust the good stretches when they arrive. But my wolf has a specific sense for the texture of before, the particular held-breath quality that precedes something arriving whether you're braced for it or not, and she'd been restless for two days without being able to tell me why.
*Something's shifting,* she said, the third morning in a row I woke to her unease.
Shifting how?
*I don't know yet. It's not a threat-shift. It's a knowing-shift. Someone in this compound knows something they haven't said.*
I filed that the way I'd learned to file her instincts — seriously, without panic, waiting for the shape to
