I looked up at Ryke.
"The mark," I said.
He nodded. Once.
I said it out loud because that's how I process things: "Someone put a suppression mark on me. Before I was old enough to remember. Which means my pack knew. Someone decided what I was needed to stay hidden." I stopped. Breathed. "What am I?"
The table held its silence like it was doing me a favor.
Ryke looked at Mitch. Mitch picked up his phone and slid it across to me — a photographed document, dense, a lineage chart. The kind packs maintain for breeding records. My name at the bottom. My mother. Her mother. Four generations back to a woman I'd never heard of, whose name was circled in red ink.
Beside it: two handwritten words.
*Primary bloodline.*
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It means," Mitch said, in his weather-rep
