Chapter 222 My Court
ADRIANA
I should have known the Storm Pack decision wasn’t going to sit quietly.
They came two days later. Five of them, which was exactly what I’d been told to expect, filing into the receiving room with the energy of men who had rehearsed what they planned to say and were confident it would work. Alpha Damon was among them, which explained a great deal about the energy in the room at that meeting when I’d shut the conversation down.
I let them sit and them arrange themselves. I took my time walking in.
The first one to speak wasn’t Damon. It was Alpha Rave, who was apparently under the impression that leading with flattery would soften me up.
“My Queen, we come to you with the greatest respect. We understand the difficulty of your position and we want to support you through it. The matter of Storm Pack—”
“I made a decision about Storm Pack,” I said.
“Yes, and we want to discuss that decision, because with the greatest respect, the King would not have—”
“The King isn’t here.” I said it simply, without heat. “I am. Those are the facts of the situation. What else?”
Alpha Rave blinked. Clearly he hadn’t expected that. But he wasn’t ready to give up it seemed because he tried again. “What we mean to say is that the King was actively considering proposals before his accident. Several of us had been in direct conversation with him about the territory. It would only be right to honor those conversations.”
“Do you have anything in writing from him? Any formal agreement?”
Neither of them spoke.
“Then there’s nothing to honor.” I looked around at all five of them. “I understand you’re frustrated. I understand some of you have had an eye on that territory for a long time. But I did not absorb Storm Pack to inconvenience you. I absorbed it because leaving a pack without any leadership while my husband is incapacitated and I am managing an entire kingdom is not something I’m willing to do. When Elijah wakes up, he’ll make a decision. Until then, it’s mine.”
Alpha Damon leaned forward in his chair. He had the look of a man who had been holding something in and had just decided he was done doing that.
“You can’t run a kingdom and a pack simultaneously,” he finally snapped. “This is exactly the problem. You’re overreaching because you don’t know what you’re doing, and the rest of us are supposed to sit here and accept it because you’re the Queen? The King would never make a decision this rash.”
I looked at him.
He didn’t stop.
“And frankly, some of us have started to wonder. The King goes down, you take over everything, and suddenly any challenge to your authority gets shut down immediately.” He held my gaze, or tried to. “How do we know you had nothing to do with what happened to him?”
The room went completely still.
I heard Hazel shift behind me. I didn’t look at her.
I stood up slowly, came around from behind the table, and walked straight toward him. He was bigger than me. Most men were. That had never meant anything.
I slapped him.
Open hand, hard enough to snap his head to the side. Then I did it again before he recovered from the first one.
The gasps were immediate. The murmuring started a second later.
Alpha Damon stood frozen with his hand half-raised toward his face, looking at me like I’d genuinely surprised him. Like he’d never once considered this outcome.
“My husband,” I said, very quietly, “has never spoken to me the way you just did. Not once in all our years together. So I will not sit in my own hall and accept it from a man who hasn’t earned the right to be in this room.” I held his gaze until I was certain he was actually listening. “I can strip everything from you. Your territory, your title, your standing in this kingdom. I am not the King. I’m something you’ve clearly never learned how to account for, which is a Queen who has absolutely nothing left to lose. Test me again.”
I walked back to my seat. My heels were the only sound in the room.
“Get out.” I didn’t raise my voice. “All of you. Storm Pack is closed as a topic of discussion. Anyone who brings it to me again, or who repeats what was said in this room today, will answer for it. That’s not a warning. That’s a fact.”
They left.
Hazel followed me into the inner chamber afterward, where Elder Matthew and two others were waiting. They’d heard. Of course they had.
“You’ll say I shouldn’t have done it in public,” I said before anyone could start.
“We were going to say,” Elder Matthew replied carefully, “that perhaps—”
“If Elijah had been sitting in that chair when Damon said what he said, he would have done considerably worse than slap him.” I looked at each of them. “I’m not going to let a man speak to me like that because he thinks my husband’s absence makes me manageable. Warn Damon. The next time he opens his mouth in my direction without the appropriate respect, it won’t be my hand he has to worry about.”
Nobody argued.
“The Moonlight Celebration is tomorrow,” I said, moving on before they could regroup. “Tell me everything is ready.”
It was. The preparations were solid, the pack was ready, the mood was as good as it could be given the circumstances. I listened, confirmed the details, and dismissed them as soon as I reasonably could.
I needed to see Lana. The maid had mentioned she seemed lighter than usual and that thought had been sitting in the back of my skull since morning.
The doctor had said she was recovering but I knew my daughter’s weight in my arms and something felt off.
I needed to hold her and check for myself.