Something Like This

The Ashfang hold had stood through worse than this. Bad winters. Border disputes. Alphas who died before their time and left everything unsettled behind them. It had a long memory and a short tolerance for disruption, and it expressed both through the people who ran it. Sera came out of the cell with her questions answered. She told herself that was why she had gone in. The hold was busy the way it was always busy. People moving, work continuing, the courtyard indifferent to whatever had just happened below it. Roan fell into step beside her the way he always did. She told him to tell the elders to wait. He told her that wasn't going to be enough. She told him it would have to be. Councilwoman Victoria Crane had other ideas. She expressed them quietly, carefully, with Sera's father's name in her mouth like a courtesy. The hold had not yet decided what it thought about the stranger below. It was only just beginning to ask. Sera already had her answer. She simply wasn't ready to say it out loud.