For three days, Crescent Hollow believed the war was over.
Three days of the pack breathing out. Three days of Cain holding court in his father's reclaimed hall, of servants who'd never been seen learning to be seen, of the slow strange work of a pack learning it was free. Three days in which I let myself believe, for the first time since the rain, that the fighting was behind us and the only thing ahead was the living.
I should have known better. I'd learned, in thirty days of war, that the moment you believe it's over is the moment it isn't.
The scout came on the fourth day.
He rode in from the eastern territories half-dead, his horse lathered to ruin, and he'd come not from any pack but from the rogue lands beyond the farthest line the lawless dark where no Alpha ruled and no law re
