The chair was designed for someone with more confidence and less nausea. It's oak, high-backed, positioned at the centre of a semicircle of elder wolves who look at me the way you'd look at an insurance claim—with scepticism and the faint hope I'll withdraw myself and save everyone the paperwork.
The pack council chamber smells like old wood and older money. Seven elders in a crescent, portraits of dead alphas watching from the walls like referees who've already picked a side.
Every living pair of eyes is trained on the half-blood in the oak chair like I'm a specimen they haven't decided how to classify.
Celeste's lawyer stands first. Polished, silver-haired, the kind of man who bills by the syllable. He buttons his jacket with the choreography of someone who has dismantled people in rooms like this for decades.
"The claimant's position rests on a single clause in an otherwise standard inheritance document." He doesn't look at me—I am the claimant, a legal abstraction, a problem to be resolved without the inconvenience of a name.
"A half-blood with no pack standing cannot serve as vessel for an inheritance that shapes the future of the entire Reed line." He turns to the elders, building his case brick by deliberate brick. "The clause is unprecedented, unenforceable, and—I submit to this council—illegitimate."
"The claimant has no recognised bloodline." Forty minutes he speaks without using my name once. "No formal pack status. No standing that would grant custodial authority over Reed Industries' controlling interest."
By minute thirty-five my jaw aches from the effort of sitting still while a man in a twelve-thousand-dollar suit explains to a room of wolves why I don't exist. My nails are buried in my palms and the crescents will be there for hours.
Blake stands. He buttons his jacket—deliberate, unhurried, every movement a statement—and the chamber goes quiet in a way that tells me these elders know exactly what Blake Wallace does to opposing counsel in rooms like this.
"Elder Hargrove, members of the council." His voice is flat, controlled, the temperature of a surgical theatre. "My colleague spent forty minutes discussing what Ms Reed is not. I'd like to discuss what the law actually says."
"Hargrove v. Eastern Pack Council, 2011." He slides a document toward the bench with the unhurried confidence of a man laying down a winning hand. "Half-blood lineage recognised for inheritance purposes under identical standing provisions. The ruling held on appeal."
"Objection." Celeste's lawyer half-rises. "That precedent involved a full-blood mother—"
"With a half-blood child whose standing was identical to my client's." Blake doesn't raise his voice, and the calm is more devastating than shouting. "If counsel had read past the headnote, he'd know that. Page fourteen, paragraph three."
The objection collapses. I watch it fall, and something behind my sternum unclenches by a single degree.
"Mercer v. Pacific Northwest Council, 2016." Blake slides a second document forward. "And Huang-Torres, 2019. Three precedents in eight years, all recognising half-blood inheritance claims under the same framework Edric Reed's clause was drafted to satisfy."
He turns to face Celeste's lawyer directly. "The will isn't an aberration. It's the most legally precise inheritance document I've reviewed in fifteen years of practice, and every clause was built to withstand exactly this challenge."
Spencer takes the stand next with the unhurried authority of a man who has never needed a room's permission to command it. When he speaks about Edric, his voice carries something I've never heard—reverence, held carefully, like glass he doesn't want to crack.
"Edric Reed discussed his daughter's future with me on multiple occasions over a period of six years." His eyes find mine across the chamber for one breath. "He was not a man who drafted clauses carelessly."
"He built protections for a daughter he could not publicly acknowledge." Spencer's voice carries the quiet force of testimony that doesn't need volume. "The inheritance clause was architecture—designed by a father who knew what his wife would attempt after his death."
The word wife detonates in Celeste's row. I don't look at her—I can feel the temperature shift from across the aisle, the way you feel weather changing before the sky confirms it.
Miles doesn't speak officially—he doesn't need to. He sits in the front row, visible and deliberate, a Wallace brother publicly aligning with the half-blood in a chamber full of wolves who will remember exactly where he chose to sit and what it cost him to sit there.
His presence is its own kind of testimony—louder than any brief, more expensive than any legal fee. Every elder who glances at him is calculating the political cost of ruling against someone the Wallace brothers are willing to stand behind in broad daylight.
"The council will deliberate." Hargrove's voice carries thirty years of authority. "A decision will be announced within the week."
No ruling. No resolution. Just a week of waiting that stretches ahead like a corridor with no visible end.
I stand on legs locked rigid for two hours and walk toward the exit with my spine straight and my chin up, because the wolves in this chamber are still watching and I will not give them a single inch of collapse.
The corridor is marble and echoing, and I'm three steps past the doors when Celeste intercepts me.
She's composed, smiling, but something behind her eyes has shifted—the confidence thinner, the smile a degree sharper. The expression of a woman who expected a cleaner kill and got a fight.
"Bailee." She says my name the way her lawyer wouldn't—deliberately, like reclaiming territory. "Whatever the council decides, this isn't over."
"It never is with you." I keep my voice level. "Is that the whole speech, or is there an intermission?"
"You should be careful about the company you keep." Her eyes harden behind the smile. "Protectors become liabilities when the political wind changes. Ask your father how that worked out."
The mention of Edric is a blade she slides between my ribs with surgical aim—the one topic guaranteed to land, and she knows it, and she used it anyway because Celeste Reed has never met a wound she didn't press. My jaw locks and my vision sharpens, but I hold my ground.
"I'll take that under advisement." My voice doesn't crack, and I'm so proud of that I could scream. "Anything else, or can I go?"
Maya stands beside her mother—silent, watching me with an expression harder to read than Celeste's open threat. Not angry. Not defeated. Something calculating and coiled behind her eyes, something that I know I won’t like. But that’s for another time.
The patience of it lifts the hairs on the back of my neck. Celeste is the threat you see coming—loud, surgical, operating in daylight. Maya is the one I should be watching, and the recognition settles into my stomach like something cold and heavy.
They turn away and I watch them walk the corridor. Celeste's heels click marble, reminding everyone that she has never doubted her right to any room she enters.
Maya walks half a step behind—silent, composed, patient in a way that tastes like a countdown.
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