We rode into the rogue lands at dusk, and the territory ended the way a held breath ends all at once, into nothing.
I'd been thrown across a territory line once, in the rain, into the dark beyond the law. But that had been the edge of it, the shallows. This was the deep. Past the last pack border, past the last carved boundary stone, into the true rogue dark where no Alpha had ever ruled and no law had ever reached a wilderness of broken country and old forests where the only rule was the one you could enforce yourself. The wolves who lived here answered to no one. That was what made them rogues. And that was what Damien and Roan had done the impossible thing of uniting.
We rode small. Cain, me, twelve of Ironfang's best, and Roan at the center of us — bound at the wrists, a blade at his
