Chapter 99
Vanya
The room blurred into focus like a photograph developing in silver light, and for a dizzy heartbeat I had no idea where I was.
Then I registered the high ceiling carved with the old runes of my pack, the heavy, curved chair at the head of the council table, the carved wolf that crowned its back—my wolf’s emblem—and everything slid into place like a truth I’d been missing all my life.
I was sitting in the Alpha chair.
My palms found the carved arms as if they belonged there. The grain of the wood was warm, worn by decades of hands heavier and more certain than mine. Around me, the council hall held its breath: betas, gammas, charlies, the gray-faced elders whose memories smelled of smoke and ash, the ordered rows of officers who kept the pack’s rules like bones. They w
