The room exhales.
In the back row, Bern is very still. His representatives are leaning toward him, speaking low, but he isn’t looking at them. He’s looking at the room, reading it, the way a man who’s controlled rooms for thirty years reads one that’s turning against him.
I watch him calculate. The stillness isn’t calm. He’s deciding whether to let the accusation sit unchallenged or to stand up and put his voice on it. Letting it sit means the financial trail dominates the conversation after the hearing. Standing up means controlling the narrative now, while the room is still processing Garrett’s testimony and before anyone has time to dig into the evidentiary packet Brenna distributed.
He’s going to stand up. I can see it in the way his hands flatten on his knees. He’s going to get ahead of this.
“If I may.” He stands. Buttons his jacket. The gesture is precise, the last piece of the mask going on. “The council should note that while Mr. Forrester’s testimony is moving, it pertains to the operations of a single pack. The Forrester corridor was a regional arrangement between a local alpha and elements of the Syndicate. It is not reflective of the broader policies of the southern pack alliance, nor of any coordinated effort by established pack leadership.”
He shifts his weight. Settling in. The room is his now, or he thinks it is.
“Financial records pass through many hands. Account linkages can be manufactured, misattributed, or misinterpreted, particularly when the source material is a disgraced pack’s ledger, maintained without independent oversight. I would urge this council to exercise appropriate caution before drawing conclusions from a document that has been presented by parties with a clear interest in broadening the scope of blame.”
He’s good. The argument is constructed to give every delegate in the room a reason to hesitate: reasonable doubt, procedural caution, the institutional instinct to protect the system rather than examine it.
“I personally had no knowledge of the specifics of the Forrester operation. No involvement. No communication with the Syndicate regarding the corridor or its —”
Mia screams.
The sound cuts Bern’s sentence short. High, thin, a child’s scream, but there’s nothing childlike about the force behind it. Every wolf in the room flinches. Conner’s arms lock around her, but she’s rigid on his lap, her body stiff as wood, her eyes fixed on Bern.
She’s pointing at him. One small hand extended, finger aimed at the silver-haired man in the back row. Her mouth is open, and the scream goes on and on.
“Mia—” Conner tries to turn her. She won’t turn. Her eyes are locked on Bern, and her body is vibrating. And then—
The wave hits.
Not sound. Not physical force. Something else. Something that slams into my skull with the flat, bright intensity of a flashbulb and floods my head with images.
Bern. Beneath flickering fluorescents, the institutional lighting. A facility corridor. Bern walking through it with a man in a white coat. Looking through an observation window. On theother side of the window — tables. Equipment. A wolf strapped down.
Bern watching through the window. Not horrified. Not disturbed. Assessing. The face of a man evaluating a business investment.
And Mia. Mia was there. Behind another window, in another room, but close enough that her young mind absorbed his presence — his face, his energy, the man who walked through her prison like he owned it.
Because hedidown it. Or the part of it that mattered. The funding. The political cover. The network that kept the facility supplied, the councils uninformed, and the whole machine running. While men like Garrett managed the calls and men like Conner stood at junctions, and none of them knew who was pulling the strings from above.
The images pour through the room. Every wolf in the building is getting them, I can see it in their faces, the stunned, sickened expressions of people seeing something they can’t unsee. Can’t unfeel. Mia’s fear and desperation are everywhere. The council chair has gone white. Delegates are on their feet. Someone in the fifth row is sobbing.
Bern staggers. His hands go to his head. He opens his mouth and blood runs from his nose, a thin line, bright red, tracking down his lip and chin.
“Make it stop!” His voice is different now. The smooth control is gone. “Make it— Make the child stop! I didn’t— Those images are—”
“True?” Brenna’s voice. Cold. “Because what I’m seeing looks very much like the southern pack leader personally inspecting a facility he claims to have no knowledge of.”
“That’s not— I was never—”
Mia screams again. The second wave is stronger. Bern drops to one knee. His ears are bleeding now, thin trails of red joining theblood from his nose. His eyes are wide, white-rimmed, the eyes of a man who’s being torn apart from the inside by a three-year-old who remembers his face.
More images. Scientists. Lab equipment. Wolves strapped down. Bern seeing it and walking by. All laid bare in the telepathic broadcast of a child who never learned to filter what she sees.
“I had to!” Bern screams. His hands are on the floor. His body is curling forward as if he’s being crushed by something invisible. “The Syndicate… they approached me. I didn’t have a choice!”
“You didn’t have a choice.” Martin’s voice. From the back of the room. Flat. Dead. “You didn’t have achoice?”
“They would have— My pack— They threatened—”
“My wife was on one of those tables.” Martin hasn’t moved from his position. His voice carries through the room without raising. “My children were separated from us on the first day. My daughter didn’t speak for six months after we got out. And you didn’t have a choice?”