Chapter 5: The Table

The Council hall stood on Wall Street behind a pair of bronze doors.

I walked through them in the one good dress I had left in the bag, a dark green one with sleeves.

Everett came in behind me.

He had chosen to walk one step behind me on purpose.

"One step back," he'd said in the car. "You go first. They'll look at whoever walks in first."

A long table ran down the middle of the dining room, set for forty.

Alphas stood in clusters with glasses in their hands, and every conversation lost a word or two as I passed.

Damon was at the far end of the table, in a black suit.

Camille stood behind his chair in a pale blue dress.

She was holding the black binder against her chest.

I had been the one standing there for four years.

Everett didn't touch me, but I felt exactly where his hand would have been, a few inches from my back.

A place card in the middle of the table read Adeline Hartigan, guest of Alpha Lyle.

He pulled out my chair, then sat down beside me.

"Falk's old girl," a man murmured from across the table. He was an Alpha from Brooklyn with a gray mustache. "I thought he kept you in a drawer."

"He did," I said. "I got out."

He coughed into his napkin.

The Chair of the Council tapped a spoon against her glass, and the room settled.

Dinner came in courses, and nobody asked me anything.

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