Chapter 3

The silence lasted maybe three seconds.

Then the room exhaled all at once — a collective, careful breath, the kind that happens when a hundred wolves decide simultaneously to pretend they were not watching.

I kept walking toward the exit. My pulse was steady. My hands were steady. The shattered decanter was behind me and I was not going to look back at it.

I heard the chair.

Not loud. Just the soft scrape of it against the floor, deliberate, from the direction of the Lycan delegation's private section. And then footsteps — unhurried, even, the kind that do not…