A she.”

ROAN

The council chamber feels smaller than it used to, or maybe I’ve just gotten used to standing in rooms that don’t require me to defend myself the moment I walk into them.

“Tell us plainly,” Elder Roth says, before I’ve even taken my seat. “Did the meeting go well or not?”

“It went as well as a first meeting could.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have right now. The Alpha of Ashborn hasn’t committed to anything. She wanted to assess the situation herself before deciding.”

“A she?” Ilsa’s head comes up sharp.

I don’t answer that. I don’t need to. The silence does it for me, and the room shifts, low murmurs breaking out down both sides of the table before anyone bothers to address me directly.

“This she,” Vasser says slowly, once the murmuring settles enough for her voice to cut through it. “Do we know her?”

“Does it matter?”

Nobody answers that. They just look at me, waiting, the way you wait for someone to finish confessing something they’ve already half-admitted.

“Sloane,” I say.

The room goes very still.

“Sloane,” Ilsa repeats, like she’s testing whether the name means what she thinks it means. “The Bishop girl.”

I don’t say anything else. I watch it land around the table exactly the way I knew it would the moment I said it out loud, eyes widening, glances passed hand to hand, an old story everyone in this room already knows the ending to, resurfacing all at once.

“Gods.” Ilsa presses two fingers to her temple like the whole situation has given her a headache. “If I were her, I wouldn’t even agree to the meeting.”

“Considering how you humiliated her two years ago,” Vasser says, quieter, “what makes you so certain she’ll help us at all.”

“I suppose we’ll find out, won’t we.” I let that sit a moment before I add the rest. “And you’re all forgetting something rather convenient. For two years, our alliance with the Hallorans has expanded this pack’s territory, your pockets, and your homes. Nobody in this room objected to any of that. Now that the cost of it has come due, you’d like to remember it was never your decision.”

Nobody has an answer for that. A few of them actually bow their heads, whether from shame or simple exhaustion I can’t tell anymore.

The ache in my chest chooses that exact moment to flare, hard and sudden, and I grind my molars and grip the arm of my chair until it passes, keeping my face as still as I can manage until it does.

“We don’t have any option besides Ashborn,” I say, once I trust my voice again. “So I’d suggest all of you get comfortable with the idea of groveling, because that’s precisely what it may come to.”

“I will beg no little girl Alpha,” Roth hisses.

I look at him for a long moment. “Then be ready to explain to your family, and everyone else’s, exactly why you’d rather lose everything than bend your knee once. Because very soon, Roth, it’s going to come to exactly that.”

Nobody speaks for a while after that.

“Very well,” Vasser says finally, sitting back. “Then we’ll move to the other matter.”

I know exactly what’s coming before she finishes the sentence, and I still don’t have a way to stop it.

“The succession,” Roth says, like the word itself is a formality he’s tired of dancing around. “It’s been two years since your bonding with Selene. The pack needs to see stability, Roan, and there is no clearer sign of stability than an heir.”

“We’re not ready for that conversation.”

“With respect,” Ilsa says, “the pack doesn’t much care whether you’re ready. They care whether this Alpha line continues past you, especially with everything else weakening around us. A child would do more for morale right now than any alliance you’re chasing.”

“That’s not a decision either of us is prepared to make under pressure like this.”

“It isn’t pressure. It’s leadership.” Vasser’s voice stays even, patient, the same patient tone she used the night I rejected Sloane in this same building. “An Alpha’s duty doesn’t pause for personal readiness.”

I feel the old, familiar weight settle back onto my shoulders, the exact weight I thought I’d already paid the worst possible price for once.

“We’ll discuss it,” I say, which isn’t agreement, though I let them hear it as one, because arguing further tonight will cost me more than I can currently afford to spend.

Roth exchanges a glance with Ilsa, the kind of glance that means there’s more coming, and I brace for it before she even opens her mouth.

“There’s another matter,” Ilsa says, careful now and my stomach drop before she finishes. “One of the healers mentioned that Selene has been overheard speaking to some of the younger women. About the marriage. About you, specifically.”

“About what, specifically.”

“That you don’t touch her the way a husband ought to.” Ilsa says it plainly, without cruelty, which somehow makes it worse. “That the bonding was completed in name only, and has stayed that way since.”

The room goes very quiet.

“That’s not the council’s concern,” I say, tighter than I mean to.

“It becomes the council’s concern,” Vasser says, “the moment it starts being discussed openly among wolves who will eventually wonder why their Alpha won’t touch his own wife. People draw conclusions, Roan, whether we want them to or not. Some of those conclusions are more dangerous to this pack right now than hunters at the border.”

I don’t have an answer that doesn’t reveal more than I’m willing to give this room. The truth, that touching Selene has never once felt like anything but obligation, that some stubborn, broken part of me has stayed loyal to a bond I severed with my own mouth two years ago even while my body was busy dying from the severing, isn’t something I can hand over to this council like a piece of policy.

“I’ll speak with Selene,” I say instead. “Privately. This isn’t a conversation for this room.”

“See that you do,” Vasser says. “Soon. The pack needs to believe in this marriage, Roan, whether or not you do.”

I’m barely out of the chamber before Marcus catches up to me, the same look on his face he had at the mill road, the one that means whatever he’s about to say is worse than anything the council just put me through.

“The blood at the crossing,” he says. “We found where it leads.”

“And?”

“A body. Half-buried out past the ridge, close enough to the tracks that it has to be connected. Old. Killed the same way as the one two years back , the one that started all of this, before the Bishop girl disappeared.”

I go cold in a way that has nothing to do with the bond-rot at all.

“There’s a mark near the site,” Marcus says. “Not Ashborn’s. Not ours. Something older, cut into the bark like it was meant to be found.”