CHAPTER 85: THE CHALLENGE
Selene's POV
Her name was Mira Vance.
Senior packhouse administrator. Twenty-six years with Nightshade — longer than Damon had been Alpha, longer than Ronan had been Beta, longer than most of the wolves currently walking these corridors had been alive. She had managed the packhouse's internal operations through two Alpha transitions and four significant border conflicts and the kind of accumulated institutional knowledge that made her simultaneously indispensable and, I was beginning to understand, convinced that indispensability was the same as authority.
She requested the meeting formally.
Not a conversation in a corridor, not a pulled-aside moment after a meal. A formal request, submitted through Felix's communications system, addressed to the Luna's office — which was a room I had technically occupied for weeks and had used primarily as a place to store documents I was actively working through.
The formality itself was the first message.
