He wants an Alpha. Let’s give him one.

Chapter Six

SLOANE — Two Years Later

The letter sits on the council table like something that might bite.

Nobody's touched it since Del set it down twenty minutes ago. Seven pairs of eyes keep drifting to it and away again, the way you look at a wound you don't want to examine too closely.

"Read it again," Elder Thessaly says. "Aloud. All of it this time."

Del picks it up. Her voice has gone formal, the voice she uses for pack business instead of the voice she's used with me since we were girls together, and some small part of me still isn't used to hearing it.

*"To the Alpha of the Ashborn Pack. I write on behalf of my pack, which faces a crisis I will not pretend I can solve alone. Our numbers to the north have weakened in recent months, and hostile packs have taken notice. I have heard of your pack's strength, its rise these past years, and its reputation for standing where others have fallen. I am asking, plainly and without pride, for your help. I would meet with your Alpha directly to discuss terms, at whatever place and time is safest for your people. — Alpha Roan."*

Nobody says anything for a moment.

"He doesn't know," Elder Corvin finally says, shaking his head slow, like the whole thing amuses and disgusts him in equal measure. "Two years, and the man doesn't even know whose door he's knocking on."

"Why would he," Del says. "We changed the name. We changed everything. You wanted it that way, Sloane, remember? So nobody would look at the Bishop name and think “rejected girl” before they thought anything else."

"I remember," I say. I remember most things from that year with a clarity I've never been grateful for.

Thessaly sets the letter down and folds her hands. "The question isn't whether he knows. The question is what we intend to do about it."

"The question," Corvin cuts in, "is why we'd lift a single finger for a man who humiliated our Luna in front of two hundred witnesses and called it pack necessity."

"The question," argues Elder Yusuf, from the far end of the table, "is whether we can afford to let pride decide alliances when Roan's pack is still the largest north of the river, weakened or not. If they fall, whoever brings them down doesn't stop at their border. You know that as well as I do."

"So we save the man who ruined her because it's *convenient*?"

"I didn't say convenient. I said necessary. There's a difference, and you know it."

"Do I?" Corvin's voice rises, sharp enough that a few of the younger council members shift in their seats. "Because from where I'm sitting it sounds exactly the same."

"Enough." Thessaly doesn't raise her voice. She's never needed to. The table goes quiet in the particular way it always does when she decides a conversation has run its course. "This isn't a debate about feelings. It's a debate about survival, ours and possibly his. Let's have it as one."

Yusuf leans forward. "Their numbers are down. Hunters have been active near their eastern border for months, I've heard it from three separate sources, none of whom talk to each other, which means it's likely true. If Roan's pack collapses, the vacuum doesn't stay empty. Something worse moves in. Possibly onto our doorstep, eventually."

"So help him for our own sake," Del says. "Not his."

"I didn't say otherwise."

"And what does helping look like?" Elder Priya asks, the first thing she's said all meeting. "Warriors? Resources? A formal alliance with our name attached to his in public, the same way his name was attached to a bonding ceremony two years ago that ended the way it did?"

Nobody has an answer for that one right away.

"He humiliated her," Corvin says again, quieter now, like repeating it might finally make it land the way he wants it to. "In front of his whole pack. In front of the Hallorans. Whatever he's facing now, he built that fire himself. I don't see why we should be the ones putting it out."

"Because we're not the same pack we were two years ago," Thessaly says, "and part of the reason we're not is sitting at the head of this table right now."

Every eye in the room turns to me.

I haven't said a word since Del finished reading. I've been sitting with my hands folded on the table, watching the argument move back and forth like a held breath, because some part of me has been waiting two years for exactly this moment without ever admitting it to myself.

"Sloane," Thessaly says, gentler now. "What do you want to do?"

I don't answer right away.

I think about a hall that smelled like cedar smoke. I think about a voice that didn't shake when it should have, telling two hundred people my hands shook too much to hold a blade, that I flinched, that I wasn't fit to carry a pack's spine. I think about a stranger's car, and a heat under my ribs that never went away, that instead grew into something that now lives in every part of me the elders in this room have learned to fear and respect in equal measure.

I think about the fact that he still doesn't know my name is attached to any of it.

"He asked to meet the Alpha," I say finally. "Not by name. Just the title."

"That's right," Del says, carefully. "As far as he knows, we've never told anyone who leads us. Just that we do."

Something settles in my chest, cold and clear, the same feeling I get right before I reach for a bond that isn't mine yet and make it mine anyway.

"Then let's give him exactly what he asked for," I say. "A meeting. With the Alpha."

Corvin's eyebrows go up. "You're going to help him."

"I didn't say that."

"Then what are you saying?"

I look around the table, at seven faces waiting for an answer I'm not sure I have yet, and for the first time in two years I let myself feel something other than the cold, patient control I've built my entire reputation on.

"I'm saying," I tell them, "that I want to watch his face when he finds out exactly whose door he's been knocking on."

Nobody speaks for a long moment.

"And after that?" Thessaly asks quietly. "After the moment. What then?"

I don't have an answer for that part yet.

For the first time in two years, I'm not sure I want one.