Silas.
Silas did not return to the packhouse with certainty.
He returned with questions.
The forest still lingered on him in a way he did not like, not because it had unsettled him, but because it had failed to. Everything about it had felt too deliberate, too structured, as though someone had taken time to shape even the silence between the trees, to control what should have been uncontrolled. That alone was enough to sit wrong in his mind.
And then there was Nyra.
That was the problem.
He had not expected her there, not in that place, not with that level of confidence, and certainly not with the kind of ease she had carried while speaking to him. Rogue or not, she had not hesitated. There had been no instinctive fear, no careful distance, none of the usual submission most people carried in his presence. She had stood her ground as though she had every right to be there.
That alone made her dangerous.
But it was what she had said that mattered more than anything else.
