FREYA
Before I can answer Asha, the door of the pack hall opens.
Forty heads turn.
Eli.
The room shifts the way a room shifts when an Alpha walks into it — every spine straightening a fraction, every breath caught for the half-second of recognition, every chair scraped a quarter inch as the women on the benches realise they have not stood. The older women rise first.
The younger ones follow them, and in the slatted light from the high windows my husband walks the length of the long room to the head of it, his face the careful Alpha-public neutral, his hands open at his sides.
He does not attend these meetings.
He has not attended a women's meeting in five years. The fact that he is here now goes through the hall faster than the sound of his boots on the wood floor, and Asha — still
