"He's right," one of them says. A young enforcer, twenty years old at most. "We've been losing ground to outside threats because we don't know how they see us. She knows."
"Times change," another says. "The pack that doesn't change with them doesn't last."
Ronan's expression shifts from displeasure to something harder. "You'd hand the future of this pack to sentiment and a human biologist?"
"I'd hand a function to someone qualified for it," Reid says calmly. “Cassidy has proven herself.”
The argument might have continued. Might have circled back through the same positions for another rotation. But Kieran's guard steps forward and Kieran himself steps with him, wrists still bound, the residual grogginess of his detainment sitting in the lines around his eyes.
"I have something to say," Kieran says.
The clearing goes quiet.
"My father told me the pack was weakened," he says. "He said Alden was a weak leader, and having a human mateconfirmed it." He looks at the ground for a moment, then back up. " I watched what happened last night. I watched Alden command a defense with a shoulder that should have kept him off the field. I watched Cassidy guide the elders and the children to safety through terrain she memorized because she prepared for the worst." He looks at me. "My father's pack was strong because it was afraid of what it might lose. That's not strength. That's just fear. What I saw last night was strength from both of them."
The clearing doesn't erupt. It shifts—Kieran’s words more powerful than expected.
Brynn was still through all of it, staff planted, eyes moving from speaker to speaker with practiced patience and active listening. Someone who absorbs everything that’s said with an unbiased ear. She looks at me.
"Are you prepared to stand for the vote?" she asks.
"Yes," I say.
I feel Alden beside me, but I don’t look at him, because I don’t feel the strength he needs me to show right now, and I don’t want to waver under his gaze.
Brynn raises her staff. "The vote is called for Dr. Cassidy Ellis as Luna of the Blackmoore pack is now open. Cast your ballads, and we will review them tonight.”
36
ALDEN
The day moves the way days do when something important is pending — in fragments, too fast and too slow at the same time.
Pack members cast their ballots through the morning and into the afternoon, a quiet procession through the east wing where Brynn has set up a formal collection box. Many council members take their time to cast their votes.
I stay out of that corridor. Being seen near the ballot process during a vote that concerns my mate is the kind of thing that gives Ronan ammunition, and I've spent enough time managing Ronan's ammunition.
I'm in the war room with Ciaran going over boundary repair assignments when Brynn sends for me.
She's in the archive room—the same basement archive Cassidy spent a pre-dawn morning working through six weeks ago. The smell of the air is lamp oil and old paper, but Brynn has three open binders spread across the reading table and a set of photographs spread beside them, and her eyes when I come down the stairs never leave the photos.
Cassidy is already there, curious eyes peering at the assembled material on the table. She looks at me when I come in, then back at the binders.
"Sit down, Alden," Brynn says.
I sit.
She opens the first binder to a flagged page. “These are Gideon's private files. The ones he kept separate from the council archive, in his own quarters, in a box underneath his winter gear." She pauses. "My people found them this morning while clearing his rooms."
I read the first letter. Then the second.
The dates go back thirty-seven months. The correspondence is with a hunting contact in two states, the language careful and deniable but the content not—Gideon inquiring about hunting syndicate activity, about land acquisition precedents, about how neighboring territories had been destabilized in other regions.
And interspersed with that, his own notes: observations about patrol gaps, about council dynamics, about the specific conditions that would need to exist for the pack to accept extreme measures.
"He staged the livestock kills as far back as three years," Brynn says, when I set the first page down.
"I see that."
