The warehouse is on the east side of the city, on a block that used to be industrial and is now the kind of nothing that nobody looks at twice. Corrugated walls. High windows blacked out from the inside. The faint chemical residue of whatever was manufactured here twenty years ago layered under the more recent smell of wolf — territorial markers, dominance signals, the olfactory residue of multiple packs sharing space they don’t want to share.
Roman drives me here at 8pm on a Wednesday in a car that has no identifying pack markings, which is the protocol for neutral-territory meetings. He parks two blocks away. We walk the last stretch in the kind of silence that is heavily loaded with the things he’s been analyzing since the text went out this afternoon to all five pack representatives.
