The Alpha Council didn't actually convene in a council chamber. We were standing in a literal dirt clearing.
It was a wide, flat patch of dead grass wedged in the back valley behind the Montana lodge, boxed in by ancient pines and the freezing wind rolling off the Rockies. Matthias had aggressively lobbied for the venue. Wolves don't legislate under drywall, he’d grunted yesterday. Roofs are for sleeping. Laws are for the dirt.
I stood at the tree line and watched the headache assemble.
Thirty-seven Alphas. Proxies from every functional pack grid in North America. They’d been trickling into the compound for forty-eight hours, some walking on two legs, some on four, and every single one of them was carrying the exact same suffocating question I’d been dodging for weeks.
What's the play
