Theodore Hale came to the Alpha house at noon.
He came alone. No entourage of junior warriors trailing behind him like satellites. No armor, no patrol leathers, no weapons visible at his hip. He wore a simple dark shirt and trousers — civilian clothes, the kind he almost never wore, the kind that made him look less like Silver Fang's most decorated warrior and more like what he actually was beneath the title and the reputation and the fifty years of carefully constructed mythology: a man. A tired, silver-haired, broad-shouldered man walking across a sunlit compound toward a meeting he had been avoiding for three months and dreading for twelve hours.
Nadia watched him from the training yard.
She had positioned herself there deliberately — visible, present, but not hovering. Not escorting
