Lenora's POV
The inquiry took three weeks.
Three weeks of testimony, record review, and the careful, exhausting work of separating what Marcelline had built from what the pack actually needed. Bramwell sat in the inquiry sessions for six to eight hours a day, reviewing his own decisions alongside the council's, not delegating the uncomfortable parts to Daren or hiding behind procedural language.
I was there for seven of the twelve sessions. My presence at the first one produced a silence in the chamber that lasted almost a full minute — four hundred people who had believed me dead, being asked to update their understanding in real time.
Elder Renatta, who had sat on the original council that condemned me and had since developed a posture of visible guilt, presided over the inquiry with
