The morning after the ceremony, I sat in the study with Rowan across from me and a blank document open between us, and I spoke for two hours without stopping.
Every pack in the network. Every Alpha currently carrying a governance bond, whether they knew it or not. Every bond placed by the original architects, traced back through four generations of careful, patient construction. The full map of a hundred-year structure built on coercion, inherited through bloodlines rather than chosen, maintained by people who were themselves carrying bonds they had inherited without ever being told they could put them down.
Rowan wrote.
His hand moved steadily across the page, his face doing the particular work of a man receiving information that was simultaneously larger than he had expected and exact
