The pack house was unusually quiet, the kind of silence that either soothed or unsettled. For me, it was the latter.
Sleep evaded me, chased away by a thousand thoughts.
I needed answers. Real ones. Not half-truths whispered between warriors or side-eyed glances exchanged when they thought I wasn’t looking.
If I was going to survive here, no, if I was going to win here, I needed to know the rules of the game. And the truth about the bond. The breeder line. The girls before me.
My bare feet padded silently across the cold stone floor. I knew where I was going long before I left my room. Down the west wing, past the old council hall, behind a wooden door carved with ancient glyphs that seemed to pulse under the moonlight streaming in.
The archives.
They weren’t forbidden, technically.
