The pack was holding its breath.
Kael felt it in every room he entered. The way conversations would continue for exactly two more sentences after he walked in before finding reasons to end. The way his senior warriors gave their briefings with the clipped efficiency of men staying strictly on the assigned topic and declining all tangents. The way elders looked at each other when they thought he wasn't watching.
Something was fermenting.
In any healthy pack this was simply the ecology of communal life — concerns flowing upward, dissent finding channels, the whole organism adjusting to new arrangements. He knew this. He had led long enough to understand that a pack's mood was information, not insubordination.
The information being transmitted was: something is wrong.
He sat at the head
