Chapter 6: The Council

The Winter Council met in a stone hall at the top of Cutter's Pass, where no pack could claim the ground.

Nine Alphas sat at a round table of black oak.

Behind each chair stood the pack's beta and a handful of elders, and behind them stood the watchers, a hundred wolves pressed against the walls.

I walked in on Kellan's arm.

I wore a deep green dress that Hester had found somewhere, cut high at the neck to hide the dead mark, and my belly showed plain under it.

On my shoulder was a silver pin shaped like a falling ash leaf.

Ashfall's luna.

I felt the room turn toward us.

At the far side of the table, Dorian had been talking to the Council's chair, an ancient she-wolf in a gray shawl.

He stopped mid-word.

I watched the color drain out of his face.

He stood so fast his chair went over.

The sound cracked through the hall, and every head turned to him.

"Elora."

My name came out of him as if it had been torn.

"Dorian," I said.

I stopped on the other side of the table from him, with a ring of black oak between us.

He stared at me, at my belly and the pin.

"You were dead," he said. "I held your cloak. I held the blood."

"It was deer blood."

Dorian's gaze snapped to Kellan, and something ugly flashed in it.

"You hid her from me."

"She asked to be hidden," Kellan said mildly. "I've never refused a luna anything."

"She is not your luna."

"I wear the pin," I said. "He gave it to me last week."

I met Dorian's eyes.

"I wanted you to grieve, and you did. I wanted you to know what it was to lose someone and be unable to take it back."

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