Chapter 176 Montoni
POV: Callum | The Feral Den, then dockside meeting
Alpha Jax Ironhide is not what I expected, which is itself a piece of information.
I expected American. The way people who have heard too many stories about American packs expect American: loud, large, performing dominance the way some wolves perform everything, as theater designed to establish position before any conversation starts. Ironhide is large, definitely, the kind of large that means his body spent years being told to be useful, but he is quiet in a way that larger men rarely are, and he looks at the Feral Den the way someone looks at a place when they are genuinely trying to understand it rather than assess it for weaknesses.
He has been in London four days. He arrived without announcement and my people found him before his people found mine, which is either careful or testing, and I have not decided which.
We meet at the dockside, my choice of location, with Tom on my left and Cormac three steps behind me where he wants to be, and Ironhide comes with two wolves from his delegation who stay at the same distance his side of the meeting as mine do, which is the etiquette of people who understand how this works.
"Your Parliament," he says, by way of opening. He gestures at the river, at the city behind it. "It's fracturing."
"We're handling it."
"You're managing it. There's a difference." He says it without hostility, which makes it harder to dismiss than if he had said it with some. "I've been watching the dock situation. The hybrid children. The Hermetic Order's facilities." He pauses. "I have packless wolves back home. In Montana we call them independents. They come in from the edges of everything, from communities that didn't hold together, and they are always the ones who end up as evidence of what happens when a system stops caring whether people survive it."
I am listening to him more carefully now.
"You're disturbed by the program," I say.
"I'm disturbed by what it means about what your institutions decided was acceptable," he says. "Yes." He looks at me directly. "I'm also here because British packs are weak and the European Covenant is three days from sending a legion and the American Confederation has been watching European expansion for fifty years and would like very much to have a foothold on this side of the water." He lets that sit without decoration. "I am telling you both of those things at the same time because I think you are the kind of person who responds better to honesty than to strategy."
Cormac makes a small sound behind me that means he is reassessing something.
"What does the Montana Confederation want?" I ask.
"Territory," Ironhide says. "Recognition. A formal partnership agreement with British packs that gives American wolves the right to settle in specific designated areas, not to govern, not to challenge existing pack hierarchy. To settle." He watches my face. "And in exchange, we bring forty trained wolves to London before the Covenant legion arrives. We stand with you. We make the European vampires negotiate instead of dictate."
The dock smells of river and cold and the specific sharpness of a decision that cannot be unmade once it is made.
"I need three days," I say.
"You have two," he says. "The Covenant moves faster than they used to."
He turns and walks back toward his delegation with the unhurried quality of someone who has made his offer and believes it was a good one and is not interested in performing uncertainty about it.
Cormac steps up beside me. "Is it a trap?"
"It might be," I say. "It also might be exactly what he said it was." I watch the river. "A man with something to gain who is also genuinely disturbed by children in cages is not a contradiction. Those things exist in the same person all the time."
"So what do we do?"
"We think about it," I say. "We think about it very fast."