CHAPTER 84: HOW THE PACK SEES
Selene's POV
Something had changed in the packhouse.
I noticed it first at breakfast — the way the room shifted when I walked in. Not the careful respectful stillness of people who were uncertain about someone they were still evaluating. Something different. Quieter. More settled. The particular quality of a group that had watched someone do something and had collectively revised their understanding without discussing it.
Before the battle, wolves had acknowledged me. Had been polite, had been curious, had been cautious in the specific way of a pack still deciding whether the woman their Alpha had claimed as mate was going to prove herself or prove a liability. After the battle — after they had seen me at the eastern border standing in a fight I hadn't been ordered into, after the word had moved through the pack the way all important things moved through it, person to person without announcement — the acknowledgment had changed quality.
