The council chamber dissolved into chaos after the runner's announcement, elders arguing over troop counts and old treaty clauses, Odette snapping orders about border patrols and messenger wolves to allied packs who might still answer Ashwood's call for aid. Elena stood at the center of it all feeling strangely calm, the eye of a storm she had, however unwillingly, caused.
She thought, watching the chamber scramble around her, of every year she had spent trying to be small enough that nobody in Carla's house would notice her, and understood with a strange, dizzying clarity that those years were now entirely, irreversibly behind her. There was no shrinking back into a corner from a war threat with her own name attached to it. Whatever came next, she would have to face it standing in the op
