LAINEY POV
The cabin was quiet in the late afternoon, and I sat at the small wooden table with a stack of papers spread out in front of me while the weak sunlight pushed through the window beside the sink. The coffee I made an hour earlier had already gone cold but I kept reaching for the mug anyway, because the routine of lifting it and setting it back down helped keep my hands steady while I worked through the complaints that had been piling up for weeks.
Most of them were the same kind of problems that always existed in a pack. Territory disputes between hunters. Arguments over shared resources. Small tensions between families that had nothing to do with politics but still had to be documented and handled properly before they turned into something worse.
Normally I liked doing this w
