DAX'S POV
The pack council met on a Tuesday.
The room was the same room it always was — the formal council chamber in the Wolfe building's lower floors, dark wood and the weight of forty years of decisions made in it. Fourteen members. Fourteen chairs. The Alpha's position at the head, which was not a chair but a standing position, because Dax's grandfather had decided that the Alpha should stand when the pack sat, so that there was never ambiguity about who held the room.
Dax stood.
Cartwright sat at the far end of the table. He'd come, which meant he was confident or desperate, and Dax was not yet certain which. He was a man in his early sixties with the particular look of someone who had been inside pack structures long enough to believe the structure itself protected him — that the
