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Damian didn’t have an answer for that. He shifted the folder to his other arm, hesitated, and thought better of whatever else he’d been about to say. He nodded toward the stairs and left her standing there.

Sloane stayed where she was, hands loose at her sides, and thought about Olivia in the garden weeks ago, the book closed on her knee, the sun warm on both of them. Olivia had told her she had a right to defend herself, on her own terms, and that surviving her father counted as knowledge nobody else in this compound had earned. It wasn’t a weakness to apologize for. It was leverage, if she was willing to use it.

She’d spent her whole life making herself small enough to survive a room. She was tired of it.

She walked to the door and opened it without knocking.

Six heads turned. Kahn sat at the head of the table with a folder open in front of him, Gideon’s handwriting visible across the top page. Caitlynn beside him. Viktor at the map, red pen still in his hand. Gideon in the chair nearest the window, his face unreadable. Chris on the far side, half out of his seat before he caught himself and sat back down.

Nobody spoke.

Kahn’s gaze moved over her slowly, weighing, cataloging. He set his pen down.

“You weren’t summoned,” he said, eyes narrowed.

She lifted her chin. “No, I wasn’t.”

“You came anyway.”

“I heard you were discussing my father without me in the room. I thought that was a mistake worth correcting.”

The silence stretched. Gideon shifted in his chair. Caitlynn’s eyes moved between Sloane and Kahn, waiting to see which way the room would break. Sloane kept her spine straight and her hands still. She did not look at Chris. Looking at him would have given away more than she was ready to hand over yet.

Kahn studied her for a long moment. Then he tipped his chin toward the empty chair at the far end of the table.

“Sit down.”

She crossed the room before he could reconsider. The chair scraped against the stone as she pulled it out. She sat, folded her hands on the table, and looked at the map spread in front of Viktor, at the red circles marking the eastern block, the smaller marks along the ridge line where a scout had been seen.

“What did Gideon find?” She chose not to address the man himself. Remembered the granite face that had remained granite as he looked at her, whilst dragging her father away all those years ago.

Kahn’s eyes flicked to Gideon, a question, and Gideon answered it with a small nod. Permission granted.

“Your father’s been building a network,” Kahn said. “Exiled wolves, at least three other packs. Gideon recognized two names on the patrol reports from twenty years ago.”

“He recruits people who’ve been thrown out,” Sloane said. “That’s not a surprise. It’s fitting. Men who lost their standing somewhere else, who wanted a pack again and didn’t care what it cost to get one.”

“It’ll keep matching. He doesn’t build things from nothing. He rebuilds what already broke.” She leaned forward, one finger finding the eastern block on the map. “But you’ve made an error with Gideon’s intelligence.”

The room went still.

“Three packs,” she said. “Three sets of exiles. You’re treating them as one force. They’re not. They’re three groups who hate three different packs, held together by one man who promised them all the same thing.”

Viktor’s pen stopped moving. “Go on.”

“The wolves from Iron Creek don’t care about this compound. They care about Iron Creek. Same with Ashfall, same with Cedar Lake. My father told them what they needed to hear to get them here, but their loyalty runs to their own grudge, not to his. The moment things go wrong, they fracture along those lines.”

“You’re saying the coalition is weak,” Kahn said.

“I’m saying it has seams.” She traced a line between two of Viktor’s red markers. “His own people—the ones who’ve been with him for years—those are dangerous. They believe in him. The recruits from other packs are leverage. Numbers. They’ll fight if they think they’re winning. The second they think they’re losing, they’ll cut and run back to whatever territory they crawled out of.”

“So we make them think they’re losing,” Viktor said.

“You make them think they’re losing early. First contact. Hit the outer ring hard enough that the borrowed wolves scatter before my father’s core group can engage. Strip the numbers away and you’re fighting fifteen, not thirty-five.”

Gideon spoke for the first time since she’d sat down. “And how do you know the coalition will fracture?”

“Because I watched him lose allies before.” She held his gaze and didn’t blink first. “Before the banishment. He had men around him then, too. Wolves who owed him, who believed he’d make them powerful. The night the Alpha confronted him, every one of them disappeared. My father inspires loyalty right up until the moment it costs something. Then he’s alone.” She paused. “He’s always been alone. He just surrounds himself with people so he doesn’t have to notice.”