Chapter 200

• Deric
• I left the pack tower that day with a weight in my chest I couldn’t quite name. The fog clung to the trees and paths as if it knew I was lost, trying to pull me back, to hold me in some kind of suspended limbo where everything made sense but nothing did at all. I walked without direction, the crunch of fallen leaves under my boots the only sound daring to disturb the oppressive silence that had settled around me.
• Every step I took, I ran through the conversation with Elvira. Her words replayed in my mind, looping endlessly, tangled in every memory I had of her from the first day I had seen her, down to the last time we spoke. She had called me her brother, and for a heartbeat, I had denied it. I wanted to deny it, to push it away. But the birthmark… the exact pattern she had described, the one hidden at the nape of her neck, the same one I had inherited—it was irrefutable.