NEVA POV
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She was twenty-two.
I found this out in the first three minutes, not because she told me her age but because she told me when she'd started questioning the thirty-year plan, and the math of when she'd been born put her at exactly twenty-two. The same age I'd been when I got on a motorcycle in the dark because forward was the only direction left.
I noticed this.
My wolf noticed me noticing it.
*Don't make it symmetrical yet,* she said. *Listen first.*
I was listening.
Wren Aldis spoke in the careful, organized way of someone who had rehearsed this conversation enough times that the rehearsal had become more real than the improvised version and she'd decided to trust the rehearsal rather than abandon it at the last moment. She had a researcher's voice — precise, building
