Grimm held her taut for the length of a slow breath.
Then something else happened.
Soren felt it as a small piece of himself leaving. Not in the body. In the wire.
The wire was what he called the frequency his bonds ran on. It was the thing he had learned to hear over the winter.
He sat up. The trace on the ceiling flickered.
Selah did not stir.
Grimm under the bed was already up and had gone from taut to something worse.
The pull kept pulling. It was not asking.
That was the piece of it that mattered.
The wolf under the bed shifted. Fur pulled back. Bone shifted under it.
The wolf's frame narrowed and lengthened and the shape that came out on the other side was Yara in the dark humanoid red irises catching the trace-glow from the ceiling.
She had never shifted this fast in a room where the pack was asleep.
She did not stand up.
She crawled out from under the bed and up onto the edge of it and sat there with her hand around Soren's wrist tight.
