Bramwell's POV
The pack fractured the way old structures do — not in one catastrophic collapse but in the sound of things giving way in sequence, each failure revealing the next.
Half the council called for immediate detainment of Marcelline. Three elders called for the same treatment to be extended to me. A contingent near the eastern doors howled for Lenora's blood, two years of a story they'd believed reacting to its revision the way the body reacts to a wound — badly, instinctively, before the mind can intervene.
I stood at the center of it with the dagger in my hand and made decisions as fast as I could make them.
"Marcelline Argot is to be held pending a full council inquiry," I said, loud enough to carry. "She is not to be harmed. She is not to leave the fortress."
Two of my ca
