Anna’s voice cut the air then, cold as a blade. She had remained in the hall’s periphery until now, every inch of her a coiled thing. She stepped forward, each movement precise. “What do we call it if not necessity?” she asked, and there was no pleading in it—only the plain arithmetic of ambition. “We remove the variable. We eliminate the chance. Better a clean end than a war twenty years from now that claims the pack and our line.”
Kingsley inclined his head, noting, not answering. The firelight caught the steel at his temple where a memory had once been carved. “It is not cruelty we propose,” he said finally. “It is stewardship. The pack endures because of hard decisions.” He said the word with the patience of one who has spent his life making them.
William — broken, trapped, the archi
