I thought that this was a great short story. It has a nice tie-in with the first book in the Mercy Thompson series. Kind of a behind-the scenes story. What is going on at the same time that Mercy is looking for the person experimenting on the wolves in "Moon Called"? Well, Charles goes to Chicago to find out who's selling wolves and he meets Anna. It's a different story from the Mercy Thompson series. It's told in third person which is good because this is equally both Charles and Anna's stories and we get both of their POV's whereas in Mercy Thompson it is clearly her story alone. This is a very worthy spin-off to Mercy Thompson. 
 Anna seems very broken in the beginning, but we learn that she still has fight in her. It's awful the things that she had to endure, but she did endure them and it's good to see by the end (even though she's still healing) she can heal. 
 Charles is a great hero who was set in his life as pack executioner. He knew what his life was going to be and maybe it's not completely what he wanted but he was going to do what was needed. When he meets Anna life takes a different direction for him. 
 I liked that we really got to see what being a werewolf is like in this world. Mercy is a coyote so we can have he perspective, but her experience with her animal is completely different from the experience of a werewolf with their animal, where the wolf is like a separate entity in the same body as the human. It was interesting to understand the edge that most of them walk on. 
 This story really sets up the rest of the Alpha Omega series very well. Immediately after I finished this story I wanted to begin the next.