Chapter 71 ZANE

Chapter 71 ZANE
I knew the names of every single person standing in this underground training room, including the young players who'd been on the team for less than a season, the older pack members who'd been here since before my father died, the support staff who knew what we were and had chosen to stay anyway, and the families who'd come in overnight because it wasn't safe to go home. All of them. 

I'd made it my job to know all of them the day I became Alpha, because a leader who didn't know his people's names wasn't really leading anyone.

I stood at the front of the room, looked at all of them, and told them the truth. The full version. I didn’t smooth it over or cut corners to make it easier for them to take it in.

I told them about the press conference, and why we'd done it. I told them about Marcus Cole and the hunter operation. I told them about Councilwoman Avery and the political angle, and how this had gone from an exposure threat to something with political backing behind it. I told them about the council hearing in three days, and the media rollout we were already watching happen in real time.

I didn't make them feel safe. My father taught me that was the worst thing a leader could do in a real crisis—make the people feel safe when they weren't, because then when the actual danger showed up, they'd have no idea what to do about it. What I gave them instead was clarity—“Here’s what's happening. Here’s what we know. Here’s where we stand.”

When I was done, the room was so quiet that everywhere felt heavy.

Then someone near the back raised a hand. They weren’t aggressive or hostile about it. Just cautious. "What about the athletic trainer?" they asked.

He didn’t mention a name, but everyone in the room knew who he was referring to.

I looked toward the back. "Nadia Cole was placed here by the hunters," I said. "She came in as part of their operation. She was collecting information on the pack before the attack."

Everyone absorbed that. Nobody erupted or shouted. That was actually harder to read than if they had, because it meant everyone was thinking hard and none of them were showing me what they actually thought yet.

"She's also the reason the attack failed," I continued. "She's the reason we knew about Avery when we did. She's the reason the council hearing is happening at all instead of us getting blindsided by a press campaign with no time to respond." I let that settle for a second. "She's with the pack."

Nobody argued. Nobody agreed out loud either. Dex was standing off to the side and when I looked at him, he gave me a look I knew well enough to read without words: “Some of them won't come around easily. They aren’t wrong to be cautious. They are werewolves, and werewolves don’t extend trust to people who'd come in with a lie, no matter how the story ended up.”

I understood that. It didn't change anything.

After the room cleared out and most people started drifting off in small groups, talking low, an older pack member named Greta came to stand next to me. She'd been with this pack longer than I'd been alive. She'd been here when my father was Alpha, and she'd stayed when I took over at twenty-two and didn't know what I was doing even though I'd never said so out loud.

She didn't say anything confrontational. She just looked at me for a moment and said, "Your father would have made the same call."

Then she walked away.

I stood there by myself for a minute after that, trying to figure out if that was a compliment or something else entirely. I still wasn't sure when I finally moved.

I found Nadia in one of the hallways about twenty minutes later. She had her laptop open and she was running through something. I didn't ask what, I just sat down next to her on the bench without saying anything. 

She didn't look up right away. When she did, she asked, "How'd it go?"

"About as well as it could," I replied.

She looked at me for a second, like she was reading the lines between my response, and then she went back to her screen.

I stayed.

Neither of us talked much, but the silence didn’t need to be filled. At some point, she was leaning slightly against my arm and I had my hand resting near hers without actually touching her, and neither of us said anything about it. It wasn't the right moment for saying or naming anything. But it was real, and we both knew it.

Then my phone buzzed with a message from a national journalist wanting a formal sit-down interview. I put it face down.

Then it buzzed again.

I picked it up this time. 

Councilwoman Avery had officially called for an emergency public safety hearing. The mayor's office had agreed to fast-track it. The hearing was in three days.

Three days…

Marcus was going to get to stand in front of a public podium and act like he was concerned, with the city's infrastructure chairwoman sitting right next to him, and the whole thing would look completely legitimate from the outside.

I showed Nadia the message. She read it and her jaw tightened slightly. That was about as much as she let show.

"We need to get inside that hearing," she said.

"I know," I said.

We looked at each other but neither of us said the rest of it out loud. Getting into that hearing or getting ahead of it in any real way, might require getting into things we hadn't fully decided to get into yet.

Including her.