Mari had discovered this particular spot during her first year on Thanet. One of the cliffside roads ended abruptly at what had once been a guard tower. Fire had gutted much of the interior. The door was gone, the stone doorway marked with deep cuts that hinted at a forgotten battle. It was hollowed-out rubble now, sometimes occupied by squatters, but it wasn’t the tower that interested Mari, but beyond it. The tower’s base was built several feet from the cliffside, and with it at her back, she could sit with her feet dangling off the edge and overlook both city and ocean with relative privacy. To get to that private rectangle of land meant climbing out the second-story window of that dilapidated tower, but such obstacles meant little when she was the Lioness.

When not in her lioness form, it meant clinging to the window ledge for dear life and then dropping to a landing most painful to her knees. Mari endured the sting, brushed dirt from her legs, and then sat with her back resting against the cold white stone. Returning to her lioness form was distinctly unappealing right now, after the battle. She craved solitude, not a barrage of senses and a hunger for blood. Mari drank in the precious silence as time marched along and the sun lowered beneath the water’s edge.

Only one other person knew of her private hideaway, and she dropped from the window with a far more elegant landing than Mari’s.

“Sorry for interrupting,” said Stasia, “but anytime you wander off from a mission like that, it makes me nervous.”

“You shouldn’t worry about me,” Mari said as Stasia sat beside her, her longer legs easily dangling over the cliff’s edge.

“But it’s my job to worry. Inherited position, no resignations. Comes with being a big sister.”

“A responsibility you rarely fulfill, I might add.”

“I never said I was good at it.” Stasia’s hair, freed of its ponytail now their battle had ended, blew wildly from the wind, and she tucked strands of it behind her ears in a vain attempt to keep it from her face. “Something bothers you, and I’d rather you let it out before it eats a hole in your stomach. So what’s on Mari’s mind?”

Mari focused on the ripples in the ocean, highlighted orange with the setting of the sun.

“Remember Noth-Wall?” she asked. “How it felt, right before the enclave was raided?”