The Silverfang great hall was already full when I stepped out of the car.

I could hear it from the drive — that low hum of a room packed with pack leaders, the particular register of Alpha voices trying not to sound like they were competing. Torches lined the stone walk. The doorway ahead was tall and open, framed in dark iron, spilling amber light onto the gravel.

I smoothed the black dress at my hips. Simple. Long sleeves. No jewelry. I had left Barnaby at the motel with a bowl of water and the television on for company, and I had kissed the top of his head twice before I closed the door.

Inside my chest, my wolf was awake. Not loud. Just there. Standing.

I walked up the steps alone.

The threshold was carved with old runes I recognized from my own journal. I crossed it.

And the room changed.

It happened in a single breath. The scent I had carried suppressed for three years — jasmine, wild and green, layered under something electric that lifted the hair on the back of my own neck — unspooled out of me all at once. I felt it leave my skin like a held breath finally released. It moved through the hall in a slow, expanding wave.

A glass paused halfway to a mouth.

A conversation cut off mid-word.

At the long tables that ringed the floor, heads began to turn. Not politely. Not one by one. In a single simultaneous motion, as if a string had been pulled through the room. Alpha after Alpha, unmated and mated alike, turning toward the door. Toward me.

Some of them inhaled visibly. One young Alpha at the second table half rose out of his seat before his Beta caught his arm.

At the head table, at the very center of the room, a man had gone completely still.

Broad shoulders. Dark hair. A jaw that did not move. He was looking at me the way a man looks at something he has been searching for so long that finding it is a physical event, a rearrangement of the bones behind his face.

His eyes were the color of storm light.

I did not know his name yet. I knew, from the way the room bent slightly around him, exactly what he was.

He stood.

The scrape of his chair was the only sound in the hall.

Across the floor, two seats down among the Ironvale delegation, another man had gone white.

Chase.

I had not looked at him yet. I did not have to. I could feel him at the edge of my vision — the way his hand had gripped the arm of his chair, the way his mouth had opened once and closed again. He could smell it too. Of course he could. He had spent three years working me hard enough to bury this scent, and he was only now, in this hall, understanding what he had been suppressing. What he had thrown away.

His face was the color of paper.

The Lycan Prince — because that was what he had to be, no one else moved a room like that — took a step out from behind the head table. Then another. His aura moved ahead of him, and I felt every other Alpha in the room lower their gaze without deciding to. The claim was not spoken. It did not need to be. He was crossing the hall, and every wolf watching understood that whatever any of them had been about to want, he had already outranked it.

My wolf pressed against the inside of my chest. Not in fear. In recognition.

He was ten strides away.

Eight.

And then a shape stepped into my path.

Red dress. Dark hair pinned up. The mark on her neck still fresh enough to be an angry pink against her skin.

Penny.

She had moved from somewhere along the wall, timed it precisely, and now she was standing directly between me and the Lycan Prince, her back to him, her body angled so that the room had a clean sight line to both of us. She had prepared this. I could see it in the set of her shoulders. She had rehearsed the exact half step, the exact tilt of her chin.

Her voice, when it came, was pitched to carry.

"The former Omega of Ironvale," she said, "has no right to stand in this hall."

The words landed clean.

The room did not react. Not with sound. But I felt every head that had turned toward my scent now turn a fraction more, watching, waiting to see which of us moved first.

I did not move.

I had not spoken since I entered the room. I did not speak now.

Behind Penny, the Lycan Prince had stopped mid-stride. Not because she had stopped him. Because he was choosing, in that single beat, how to answer — and I understood in the space of that choice that whatever he did next was not going to be small.

Penny's expression was composed. Certain. She was watching my face for the flicker she had come here to collect.

I let her look.

My scent kept unfurling into the room, thicker now, and I saw the exact moment she registered it — the shift in the air, the way the Alphas behind her were not looking at her at all. Her eyes moved, just slightly, past my shoulder. She had prepared for a rejected Omega walking into a hostile room.

She had not prepared for what was standing behind her.

Her mouth opened.

Behind her, the Lycan Prince took one more step.