Apparently you can hear a hundred werewolves go silent at once. It sounds like the inside of a held breath.
The silence after Ronan's declaration stretched long enough that I could hear my own pulse in my ears, could feel the weight of every eye in that hall shifting between the two of us, recalculating something none of them had expected to have to recalculate tonight. Some faces held something close to awe — a few younger wolves near the back, wide-eyed, like they were witnessing something out of the old stories they'd grown up hearing. Others held nothing but cold hostility, the gray-templed elder's expression gone stony and unreadable in a way that promised this fight wasn't actually over, just postponed.
I stood there beside Ronan, my heart still hammering from my own speech moments
