There were nights when the mate bond did something outside every category Nara had built for it.
This was one of them.
Three in the morning. The east tower room. The city below doing its deepest-hour thing — quieter than quiet, the specific hush of a place that never fully slept but occasionally rested.
She woke to the bond doing something she had only felt once before. Not alarm. Not urgency. The deep, rolling frequency of Caelen — not the howl, which she'd felt in echoes through the three years and had come to understand as grief in wolf-language. Something different. Something that had no preceding entry in her catalog.
Solène was already awake.
*What is he doing?* Nara said.
*Saying something,* Solène said. *Listen.*
She listened.
The frequency built — slow, deliberate, the way
