Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 91: Turn Her In

~LYRA’S POV~

The formal session convened two days after the letter arrived.

Shadowfang’s senior council members were present via secured messenger rela, the kind of arrangement we used when physical travel wasn’t possible but the conversation was too sensitive for standard channels. Three of them. I knew before the first message came through which three they were going to be, because Dravec had told me, in the particular quiet of the night before, who on the council had signed the letter. He hadn’t been asked and he’d told me anyway, which was its own kind of answer about where his loyalties actually sat.

Two Moonveil members sent their positions through Eren’s channel separately, not as part of the Shadowfang delegation, making their own case. They wouldn’t fight for a Moonborn they barely knew, their messages said. They were clear that this wasn’t personal and they were clear that it was cold logic: sacrifice one to save thousands. The math was simple if you accepted the premise.

I sat at the head of the table and I listened to all of it.

Every argument. Every calculation. Every version of the same essential position dressed in different language, some of them diplomatic, some of them blunt, one of them so carefully worded that it took me a full reading to understand it was saying the same thing as the others. I listened with my face completely still and I didn’t interrupt and I didn’t respond until the last message had been read aloud and the room had settled into the quiet of people waiting to see what happened next.

Then Eren stood up.

He didn’t raise his voice. He never needed to raise his voice when he was making a point he’d already worked through completely and was confident was correct.

"Let me be direct," he said. He looked around the table, at Cade, at Ryland, at the relay operators who would carry the response back. "Even if we handed her over, and we are not doing that, the Huntsmen were not formed to suppress the Moonborn. The Moonborn is their justification for mobilising. Their actual mandate, documented in their founding records, is extermination of werewolves. All werewolves. Every pack. Every bloodline. The wolf ascendancy is the enemy, not the individual currently leading it."

He paused.

"If we surrender Lyra, we lose our strongest asset against them. We lose the alliance we’ve spent the last eight months building. We lose the trust of every wolf in every pack who has been watching whether the unification holds under pressure."

Another pause.

"And the Huntsmen still come. They will come for every wolf in every territory. They will just come with one fewer reason to justify restraint and one fewer reason to believe the packs will put up a unified fight."

He looked at the relay.

"So no. We don’t hand anyone over. We fight."

The room held the silence of people who had just heard something framed clearly enough that the alternatives required actively choosing not to understand.

Dravec rubbed his jaw. He had the expression of someone who agreed with everything that had just been said and was going to say something difficult anyway. "Some of the council won’t accept that argument," he said. "They’ve made the calculation and they’ve settled on it. They’re not going to be moved by logic from this room."

"Then the council needs to be persuaded more directly," Eren said. "Or replaced."

"You can’t replace elected council members with a decree," Dravec said.

"No," Eren agreed. "Which is why it requires persuasion rather than decree." He looked at Dravec with the specific patience of someone who was holding a position and wasn’t moving off it. "That persuasion needs to come from inside Shadowfang. It needs to come from someone those council members respect and will actually hear."

Dravec said nothing for a moment.

I set down the document I’d been holding.

"I’ll go to Shadowfang myself," I said.

Everyone looked at me.

"Let them look me in the eye and tell me what I am to them now," I said.

"After the battle. After Kael. After everything that the last year has been and everything we’ve built together." I held Dravec’s gaze. "Let them say it to my face rather than through a sealed letter. And let me say what needs to be said directly rather than through a relay." I paused. "Set it up."

Dravec looked at me for a long moment. The complicated expression of someone who was simultaneously relieved that someone was taking the thing seriously and unhappy about what taking it seriously was going to look like.

"I’ll arrange it," he said.

I nodded. Looked around the table at Cade, at Eren, at the session documentation being compiled by the relay operator.

Ryland had been quiet through all of it. He’d been present, fully present, in the way that Ryland was present in things he was processing carefully, attending to everything, tracking the conversation, but holding his own response inside until the shape of what was needed became clear. He didn’t speak now either.

He put his hand over mine on the table.

Flat. Steady. The full weight of it, no hesitation, no announcement. Just his hand on mine, present and certain, the specific quality of someone who had made a decision without deliberating and was communicating the decision without words.

He didn’t say anything.

He didn’t have to.

I turned my hand over under his and we sat like that for a moment while the session documentation continued around us, and I thought about Shadowfang and the council members who had signed a letter suggesting I be traded for peace, and I thought about what I was going to say to them in person, and I thought about Kael in the in-between and whether he could see any of this from wherever he was suspended.

The session closed.

Dravec left to send the arrangement rider.

—

The arrow was found at midnight in the centre of the Silverclaw training yard.

Not fired at anyone. Not embedded in a wall or a post or any surface that indicated it had been shot from outside the perimeter. Standing upright in the dirt at the exact centre of the yard, as if it had been placed there by hand, by someone who had walked in and walked out without being seen. ƒrēewebnovel.com

Cade brought me from my quarters to see it before anything was moved.

The shaft was dark wood with the particular density of something made for weight and distance. Three silver bands near the tip. Wrapped around the shaft below the fletching, tied with a thin cord, was a note. Small, precise handwriting on material that wasn’t paper, something older, thicker, the kind of material that lasted.

I took it from the cord without touching the shaft.

I read it.

The Moonborn has seven days to present herself. After that, we stop being selective about who we kill.

I read it twice. Set it carefully in Cade’s hand without comment.

He read it. Then he studied the arrow in the ground with the focused attention of someone reading secondary information from a primary object.

"Three notches near the head," he said. He crouched, looking at the silver bands and the specific markings between them that I’d missed. "Not decorative. These are generational markings. Each notch represents a generation of the founding bloodline." He stood. He looked at me with the steady quality he wore when the information was significant and he wanted it received without the weight of his reaction on top of it.

"Third generation," Cade said. "These are the sons of the founders’ sons."