The Mate Who Marked Me
But by the third day after Julian's appearance before the council, the pattern had grown too consistent, too deliberate, to explain away any longer.
I heard the word for the first time properly outside the kitchens, two younger pack members I didn't recognize pausing their conversation only after I was already close enough to catch the tail end of it. Wolfless. Said quietly, almost carelessly, the way you might mention weather or an ordinary chore. Somehow that casualness cut deeper than open cruelty would have managed, the sense that my absence of a wolf had become, once again, a simple fact rather than an accusation, something spoken about rather than to me,