Chapter 41. Wade's Mother

June's POV

By midnight, the whole outpost knew.

Not the details. Just the shape of it. Wade, the nursemaid's son, the boy who'd learned to swim in the lake above the pack house beside the Alpha, had put enough root in Edda's tea to stop her heart. And he'd done it for money. Whose money, only the four of us who'd been in the ward knew, and Ronan had told us to keep it that way.

They locked him in the old smokehouse behind the stables, because the cellar was already full of Corvin. Two guards on the door. A floodlight on the roof. Nobody slept.

I sat on the steps of the healer's house with my knees pulled up, watching the smokehouse door, and listened to the pack fall apart around me.

"Banish him," someone said in the dark by the woodpile. "Tonight. Over the line and let the Reach have him."

"Banish him? He nearly killed a woman in Maren's own ward."

"He was one