SERA

For three full seconds, nobody moved.

My words hung in the banquet hall like smoke after a gunshot. Two hundred wolves, four Elders, Kael's entire senior leadership, and Cora with her hands frozen around a dessert spoon, all of them staring at me like I'd just pulled a pin out of a grenade and swallowed it.

Councilor Voss's expression didn't change. She watched me with the same measured patience she'd maintained all evening, her eyes moving between my face and Kael's with the practiced ...