THORNE POINT OF VIEW

For a moment, I truly believed my mind had betrayed me.

That the long nights, the pain, the fury I had carried since waking in that hut had finally twisted into something unreal. The forest had a way of doing that, of blurring the line between memory and illusion, between what was lost and what could never be regained because the voice I had just heard belonged to a past I had buried with my own supposed death.

“Alpha?”

The word did not just reach my ears.

It struck ...