The child came before dawn.
Not dramatically — or not with the drama of crisis. The drama of arrival, which was its own kind entirely. The specific, irreversible moment when something that was potential became actual, when a bond thread that had been faint and building suddenly sharpened into a frequency that was distinct and specific and entirely itself.
The pack bond felt it simultaneously.
Five hundred wolves, asleep and half-awake across the compound and the territory, registering the arrival of a new thread in the collective warmth. Not the combined-bloodline heir's frequency — that was Rowan's, established and growing. Something adjacent. Something that carried the Elara-line echo alongside a quality that was specifically Neva's — direct, unornamented, cutting to the essential.
T
