POV: Jessie Walker
The iron rungs of the service ladder were slick with a black, oily condensation that shouldn't have existed in this humidity. My lungs burned—not from the climb, but from the thick, necrotic stench that had settled over Wildfire like a shroud.
For eighteen years, I had walked these halls with my head down. I had played the part of the loyal Beta, the quiet worker, the man who accepted the "freakishness" of his daughter as a burden rather than the miracle it was. I had watched Alaric Conrad sneer at Amethyst, and I had watched his son Desmond treat her like a stain on the pack's reputation.
They thought I was a coward. They thought I had stayed because I had nowhere else to go.
They were wrong. I stayed because a father’s greatest weapon isn't his teeth—it’s his patie
