"I think we have everything we—" Declan starts.
The sound of the papers hitting the floor is very clean.
Not a knock or a fumble—a deliberate, complete action, the entire stack on the desk swept to the floor in one motion, pages spreading across the linoleum with the specific rustle of documentation that has been sent somewhere other than where it was. The sound bounces off the fluorescent-lit walls and hangs in the room for a moment.
The three of us look at Rowan.
He is standing now.
The councilman blinks. Stares at the papers on the floor. Stares at Rowan, who is looking back at him with the dark eyes that I have been learning to read and am reading very clearly right now. The black pepper has sharpened in the room—the specific edge that his scent takes on when something has moved past his tolerance threshold.
"How dare?—"
"Apologize," Rowan says.
The word arrives with the particular quality of a thing that has been decided before it was spoken. No heat, no performance—just the statement of the next thing that is going to happen, delivered with the absolute certainty of a man who has made his assessment and is not revisiting it.
The councilman's mouth opens and closes.
Rowan gestures—one measured movement, his hand indicating me.
"To my Omega. First."
The man looks at me.
Then at Rowan.
Then at Rowan again, with the expression of a person who is searching for the scenario in which this is a joke and not finding it.
He swallows.
"My apologies," he says, to the general direction of my shoulder. "For the disrespect."
"Half an apology," Rowan says, unmoved. "But since our time has the same value as yours, I won't make you try again. People like you don't learn on the first instance. You'll understand the lesson when an Alpha loses patience with you over disrespecting his Omega and you're given the opportunity to reconsider your position from a different vantage point."
He pauses.
"In the next life, of course."
The room is extremely quiet.
He just threatened this man.
Calmly. Conversationally. In the same register he uses to discuss financial strategy and morning coffee preferences. Rowan Blackwell has just implied that a municipal councilman might be murdered over an insufficient apology and delivered it like a weather update.
The man is visibly trembling. His hands on the desk are doing something involuntary.
"I—again, I apologize. For my—" He swallows again. "For my oversight."
"Better," Rowan says, with the specific lack of satisfaction of someone grading something on the lower end of acceptableand confirming it. He sits back down. Re-crosses his leg. "Now. Summarize the requirements in plain terms. The dates, the evidence protocol, the annulment conditions."
The man finds the file with the speed of someone who wants this interaction resolved. His voice, when he speaks again, has lost its administrative flatness entirely and replaced it with the careful, even tone of a person who has had their priorities rearranged in real time.
"Documented dates," he says. "Proof of cohabitation—photos, location check-ins, any form of shared record. There are—" He clears his throat. "There are regional events running through the extended St. Patrick's Day period. The small towns in the county have coordinated a schedule of activities—themed events, concerts, fundraisers, community gatherings. Attending these events generates official stamps on the pack's registry file. The stamps serve as documentation."
Finn tilts his head. "That wasn't in the initial paperwork."
"It was," the man says, "in the supplementary addendum. Page seven."
