Three days after the battle, the Elder Council arrived at Silverfang.
Not to adjudicate — to collect. Sova led the delegation herself, which Mira had not expected and which Damien said told them something significant about how seriously the Council was treating the expanded inquiry. Valdris was transferred to Council custody in a formal proceeding in the central yard, witnessed by the full pack, documented for the Council's records.
He did not look at Mira during the transfer.
She looked at him.
She needed to see him clearly — not as the threat that had shaped her entire life from before she was old enough to know it, not as the monster of thirty years of hunting, but as what he actually was in this moment. An old man who had built a structure of stolen power over three decades and was
