Chapter 35 *

Chapter 35 *
Logan's POV
Damon knocked twice.
"Come in."
He entered with a folder and the particular expression he wore when the information was worth watching someone receive.
"Your brother had dinner at the elder hall again." He set the folder down beside my hand. "Your father made the calls himself. Eight packs sent representatives. The meeting was framed as a social gathering — unofficial, no minutes, no formal record."
I didn't look up from what I was reading. "Names."
He had the list ready before I finished the word. He always did.
I scanned it. Eight packs. Three of them held significant territorial weight — old alliances, resource corridors that predated my tenure as Alpha by five years. Packs that had sat at my father's table and assumed that meant something about mine.
"Terminate their resource agreements," I said. "All of them. Territory corridor access, training facility sharing, seasonal recruitment pipelines — everything Blackstone-sourced. Done by end of week."
"Two of those packs have standing that reaches back three generations," he said.
"I know."
"And four of them have active fighters in the regional circuit. Pulling the agreements mid-cycle will—"
"Damon."
He stopped.
I set down the paper I was holding and looked at him. "Blackstone's leverage isn't the land my father left me or the alliances he spent twenty years cultivating. It's the league. The training infrastructure. The sponsorship network I built from nothing five years ago when nobody thought a twenty-two-year-old Alpha had any business touching professional fight management." I picked up the paper again. "If those eight packs haven't figured out which side of that table is load-bearing, I can't help them. And I don't want to."
A beat.
"Understood," Damon said. He picked up the folder. "Anything else tonight?"
I'd been about to say no.
The name had been sitting somewhere in the back of my mind since I'd first heard it — not attached to anything specific, just surfacing the way names do when they've appeared in enough separate threads.
"Alora Morrow," I said. "What's her schedule look like."
"There's a league gala in two nights," he said. "Neutral territory — the Ironridge annual awards ceremony. The kind of event that half the packs in the region treat as their social calendar." He paused. One second. Not long, but deliberate. "She's attending with Keaton Remington."
Keaton's rejection ceremony had been filed and processed. Whatever remained between him and Emery was the residue of procedure — not an active bond, not a living claim. The ceremony was done. That part was done.
Which meant Alora walking into a room full of pack representatives, on Keaton's arm, at the highest-visibility event on the regional circuit — that wasn't a violation of anything written down. It was something else. It was standing in the center of a room where everyone from six packs and half a dozen independent territories would be watching, and saying: look what I have. Look at who she used to be. Look at how little that turned out to matter.
A former Luna, reduced to a caption.
I looked back at my desk.
"Who holds the naming rights for the gala?"
"Currently open." Damon's voice had shifted slightly — not warmer, just more attentive. The register he used when he was filing something away under pay close attention to this. "They've been in talks with three packs. Nothing closed."
"Have our events office contact the organizers tonight. Blackstone takes naming rights." I turned a page. "We have one condition."
"Which is."
"After the ceremony. Thirty minutes. Open press segment — structured Q&A, media floor, no topic restrictions." I paused. "Make sure we have people in the room."
"Understood," he said.