What he is doing there

"The ritual requires a location," Bastien says.He says it in the hallway at midnight and his voice is doing the flat operational thing, which means he is already three steps ahead and is catching up to me.The binding location,I say. Nadia mentioned it. A place of established pack power where the ritual can be anchored. I look at Bastien. He is not going there to perform a ritual. The ritual requires willing blood and I am here and the statue is gone and I am not going anywhere near that site.Then why is he going, Bastien says.It is not a challenge. It is genuine.I think.My father reads the articles. My father reads the tribunal record. My father understands that the statutory framework is gone and the willing blood requirement stands and every legal and political mechanism he built is dismantled.He is not going north because he thinks the ritual is still viable.He is going north because the site is in the Crest Pack historical record as a ceremonial location. Because it is doc

Fourteen minutes

"Competing registrations go to a resolution panel," Holt says at seven in the morning.She is on the phone and her voice has the particular quality it gets when she has been awake for a very long time and has resolved the being-awake into pure function.Which panel, Bastien says.Council heritage division, she says. Three-member panel. The standard resolution timeline is four to eight weeks. During that period neither registration is active, which means neither party has a definitive custodial claim. A pause. The site is effectively frozen.He cannot use it, I say.Correct, she says. And the interim council cannot demolish or cede it. Both parties are in a holding pattern until the panel rules.What is the resolution criterion, Bastien says.Which party has the stronger claim to custodial standing, Holt says. A family member's historical claim versus a pack council's administrative claim. She pauses. The pack council claim is generally stronger in precedent. But the panel has discreti

Neve

"She asked me why I came," Ivy says.It is afternoon and Ivy is on the phone from the compound and she has the particular quality in her voice of someone who has had an unexpectedly good conversation and is still sitting with it.What did you say, I ask.I said I came because it is my pack and I wanted to be seen in it, Ivy says. She looked at me for a moment and then she said: that is the right answer. A pause. She has been here for three years managing the eastern boundary logistics and she said nobody from the main house has ever asked her opinion about anything until Marta did two weeks ago.What did Marta ask her, I say.Whether she thought the pack was being run correctly, Ivy says. Neve said no. Marta asked her how she would run it. Neve told her for forty minutes. Another pause. Marta apparently took notes.I smile.She sounds like Marta's candidate, I say.She is Marta's candidate, Ivy says. But not the way my father uses candidates. Marta is not asking Neve to be something.

The external call

"Vane," Bastien says.He says it at eight in the evening after two hours of Soren pulling communication records through every available channel, and he says it with the specific flatness of someone who is not surprised but is not pleased either.Vane is removed from the council, I say.He is removed, Bastien says. He is not gone. He is sixty-three years old and he has thirty years of pack-world connections and a lifetime of accumulated knowledge about bloodline tracking and pack law. He looks at the table. My father approached him. Years ago. Before the contract. Before any of this.You think your father reached Vane this afternoon, I say.I think Vane is the only external party with enough knowledge, enough motivation, and enough remaining resentment to be useful to my father right now. He holds my gaze. Vane lost a thirty-year career in one council finding. He will not have accepted that quietly.Soren turns his laptop toward us.The screen shows a communication log from a pack-adja

All Chapters of PREGNANT WITH THE ALPHA'S UNWANTED HEIR : Chapter 71 - Chapter 74

What he is doing there

Fourteen minutes

Neve

The external call