NOVAThe training ground was bigger than it looked from the gates.She'd clocked it yesterday on the walk over, but standing in it now, in full uniform, shoulder to shoulder with sixty other wolves lined up in formation across the packed dirt, it felt different. The space pressed back. Old ground. The kind that had absorbed enough blood and sweat over enough years that it had its own smell now, something mineral and layered underneath the cold morning air.Every trainee stood straight. No talking. Sixty sets of eyes forward, sixty wolves reading the same room the same way – that particular stillness of predators who've been told to wait.Nova stood in line and kept her face flat and her breathing even and told her wolf, again, to stay down.The man who walked out to the centre of the ground wasn't large. Average height, lean, somewhere in his forties, with close-cropped grey at his temples and the unhurried walk of someone who'd never once needed to prove anything by arriving quickly.
Last Updated : 2026-04-27 Read more