Chapter 1- Clara

There were very few mornings when I could look out my bedroom window and forget that my father owned everything I could see. 

Technically, owned wasn't the right word. Pack territory didn't belong to an Alpha the way a human might own a few hundred acres and a vacation house. Westbrook belonged to all of us, bound together through generations of blood, loyalty and the wolves we carried inside us. Families had lived on this land long before I was born and would probably still be here long after I died. They had homes, businesses, gardens, children who attended our school and grandparents buried beneath the old oaks on the northern ridge. 

But Marcus Westbrook was their Alpha, which meant there wasn't much that happened within our borders that didn't eventually become his concern. 

From the third floor of the Packhouse, the heart of our territory stretched beyond the glass in layers of early-morning mist and autumn green. The lawn below my window sloped toward the gardens before disappearing into woodland, and farther east, where the trees thinned, I could just make out the roof of the school and one corner of the medical center. The training grounds were hidden from this side of the house, although the distant crack of something heavy and striking a practice pad told me the morning Warriors were already already at work. 

Normally, I liked this hour. 

There was a narrow pocket of time between sunrise and the Packhouse properly waking when the place almost belonged to me. No phones ringing downstairs. No members waiting outside my father's office. No staff moving between the kitchens and dining room. Even the younger children who sometimes tore through the communal rooms as though hallways had been invented specifically for running were still at home or asleep. 

I could make coffee in the little kitchenette at the end of our family wing, sit on the deep sill beneath my bedroom window and pretend I was simply an eighteen-year-old girl avoiding the start of her day. 

This morning, three white delivery vans were already coming through the main gates. 

I watched the first turn onto the circular drive and sighed into my coffee. 

So much for that. 

The Alpha Council would arrive today. 

Not the Council itself, technically. Their first formal session wouldn't begin until tomorrow morning, but by lunchtime the visiting delegations would start crossing Westbrook's borders, and by dinner, nearly every guest room in the Packhouse would be occupied by people whose presence required security briefings, seating charts and enough expensive alcohol to make me question how many of them had functioning livers. 

For the next six days, Westbrook would become the center of regional wolf politics. 

The quarterly Council existed because putting a border between two packs didn't prevent them from occassionaly wanting to tear each other's throats out. Alphas governed their own territories, but territories touched. Members married across pack lines. Businesses overlapped. Hunting agreements, travel routes and old grudges had a habit of suriving much longer than the people who created them. Four times a year, the region's sitting Alpha's gathered to deal with whatever couldn't be handled privately before a disagreement become something bloodier. 

Hosting rotated between packs. 

This quarter belonged to us. 

Which is why three delivery vans had crept up our drive before seven in the morning, why the south cottages had been emptied for visiting warriors, why our security patrols had doubled for the week, and why I spent most of the last three months organizing an event I wasn't technically in charge of. 

I took another sip of coffee and watched a fourth vehicle appear beyond the gates. 

Behind me, my bedroom looked as though the Council had already invaded. 

Schedules covered half of my desk. A seating chart lay open across the small table near the windows, surrounded by sticky notes bearing names and dietary restrictions. Two dresses hung from the wardrobe doors because I still hadn't decided which one would survive tomorrow's formal welcome without my father finding somethng wrong with it, and a stack of cream-colored folders waiting on the chair where I'd left them sometime after midnight. 

My phone buzzed beside me. 

Rachel: Please tell me you changed the ballroom diagram.

I sighed and stared at it. Then glanced at the time. 

6:47 am. 

There was no reason anyone should be discussing ballroom diagrams before seven in the morning. Unfortunately, I knew exactly which diagram she meant. 

I set my coffee aside and typed back. 

Clara: The revised copy is on my desk. I'll bring it downstairs. 

Rachel: I love when you say things, like you know where anything is on your desk. 

I smiled. 

Clara: Blue folder. I can't miss it. 

Rachel: That is what you said yesterday about the security maps. I found them under a box of candles in the kitchen. 

The last time Westbrook hosted the Council meeting, I had been fifteen, and helping had meant assembling welcome baskets and spending an entire afternoon tying ribbons around programs until my fingers hurt. Since then, I'd taken on more whenever Westbrook attended gatherings elsewhere- helping with correspondence, accompanying my father to formal functions, learning the rhythms of the Luna events and the thousand invisible details that surrounded the actual meetings, but hosting was different. 

There hadn't been a meeting where my father formally handed me the responsibility. Marcus rarely did anything so straightforward. In January he'd forwarded me an email from one of the visiting packs asking about accommodations and told me to handle it. A few days later, an email arrived about dietary restrictions. Then transportation. Guest suites. Menus. Security requirements. 

By spring, the Packhouse staff were coming directly to me with their questions. 

In another pack, the work would have belonged to my mother, the Luna. 

Eleanor Westbrook had died giving birth to me eighteen years ago, and my father had never taken another mate. Westbrook had been without a Luna for my entire life. Other woman had filled pieces of the role over the years when necessity demanded it, but there were some duties Marcus preferred to keep within the Alpha family. 

As his daughter, I apparently was close enough. 

I wasn't a Luna. I wasn't an heir either. That distinction belonged to my older brother, Alexander, by virtue of being both the firstborn and male.  Alex was away at college enjoying what appeared from his social media to be an ambitious combitination of business classes, fraternity parties and women whose names I had stopped trying to remember. 

He would come home eventually. 

He would take our father's place eventually. 

Until then, nobody expected him to organize floral arrangements. Lucky bastard. 

I pushed away from the window before the thought could sharpen into something uglier. I loved my brother. Loving him didn't prevent me from occasionally wanting to throw his phone into a lake when he complained that our father was "on his ass" about grades from two hundred miles away. 

My gaze caught on the photograph tucked into the edge of my mirror as I crossed the room. It was old enough that the corners had softened. My mother sat on the back terrace with Alexander in her lap, laughing at whoever stood behind the camera. She was heavily pregnant with me. One hand rested over the curve of her stomach while Alex, barely four, seemed determined to escape her arms and reach something outside the frame. 

I had dozens of photographs of my mother. This one was my favorite because she wasn't looking at the camera. 

Formal portraits made her seem like the Luna everyone else remembered: beautiful, composed, elegant beside my father. In this one, her hair was coming loose and her head was tipped back with laughter. She looked young. 

She had been young. Thirty-one. 

For most of my childhood, thirty-one sounded impossibly adult. Now, with nineteen nearly two weeks away, it didn't seem old enough to become a memory. 

I touched the edge of the photograph before reaching for the clothes I'd laid out the night before. 

The arrival day didn't require formal dress, but there was no version of the morning in which my father would tolerate me wandering downstairs in leggings and an oversized sweatshirt while visiting leadership crossed our borders. I pulled on black dress pants and a cream blouse instead, then twisted my hair up before changing my mind and letting it fall loose again. 

My reflection stared back at me.

Brown hair. Green eyes. No makeup beyond mascara because I couldn't be bothered with anything else before breakfast. At five-two, I had long ago accepted that pants advertised as ankle-length would probably fit me like regular ones and that most people in our pack could see directly over my head. 

My father considered my height unfortunate. I considered his opinion irrelevant. Most of the time. 

I reached automatically for the necklace I wore on special occassions and found bare wood beneath my fingertips. The moonstone pendant wasn't on my dresser. 

I frowned, searching around the hairbrush and small collection of earrings scattered beside it. Nothing. I checked the bathroom counter, then the nightstand. Still nothing. 

"Great." 

It had belonged to my mother. My father had given it to me on my sixteenth birthday in a small velvet box, telling me that she had worn it often when they were young. The stone itself wasn't particularly valuable, but the setting was old silver, delicate enough that I had always been slightly afraid of breaking it. 

Marcus noticed when I didn't wear it for events like this. 

The sensible thing would have been to keep looking until I found it. The sensible thing would also have resulted in me spending the next half hour crawling around my bedroom while the first deliveries piled up downstairs. 

I would have to find it later. 

My father would survive. Probably. 

I gathered the blue folder from my desk, grabbed my coffee and headed into the hall.