Nikolai

The conference room doors swung open, and I walked into silence.

Every alpha in the room shot to their feet, chairs scraping against stone, the sound a discordant symphony that died almost as soon as it began. Twenty-three of them. Western alphas, the ones whose territories bordered the wild lands, the ones who had been bleeding out for months while I sat in a cage.

I let my gaze sweep across the room, cataloguing faces, weighing the fear in their eyes against the defiance I knew ...