Soren Haldane spent the morning of his own ceremony remembering names, because that was the part of the day he could actually do something about.
He stood at the foot of the platform and greeted every elder who came up the hill: the one with the bad hip, the two who had buried a son, the woman who taught him to read a scent trail before he could read a page. Warriors stood proudly. Elders offered blessings.
“You didn’t have to stand for the whole of it,”
he told the old woman, and she hit him on the arm with her stick and told him to go and be an Alpha somewhere else.
His father said the words over the three of them. Anton took them with his hands behind his back. Emrik got the laugh he was working for. Soren kept his eyes on the crowd and told himself that the Alpha Ceremony was supposed to be the happiest day in the pack’s history, and that he was not going to spend it looking for one particular face that had every reason not to be there.
Then the mind link opened, and his brother said one word that made the whole hillside tilt.
“Is everything alright?”
Soren asked, already turning.
The answer came back four words long. Soren ran.
He came through the door of the pack house with it swinging back against the wall and his breath still hard, and then he saw the arm his brother was holding, and the face above it, and his eyes widened in stunned disbelief — because he knew exactly what the three of them had done to you, in order, in detail, and because not one of them had ever been made to answer for any of it.