(Catherine POV)
I sank into the chair by my fireplace, Mother's letter still folded on the table beside me like a reminder of everything I'd be leaving behind permanently. The human world with its comprehensible rules and predictable consequences, where women might be constrained by society's expectations but at least understood what those expectations were.
Here, I was fumbling through customs I didn't understand, navigating politics that could turn deadly without warning. The pack dynamics alone were labyrinthine—hierarchies within hierarchies, alliances and enmities that stretched back generations, codes of behavior that everyone else had learned from birth while I tried to piece together fragments from observation and overheard conversation.
What was the proper way to address pack m
