He sealed the letter. Council wax, pressed with the ring he'd worn since his appointment. He placed it on the table next to the field report and sat for a moment in the quiet of the tent.

The bond was the operational problem. The child was the real one.

99.97 percent. The number sat in Aldric's mind the way a stone sits in a shoe. Not painful. Not ignorable. Just there, pressing, reminding you with every step that something was out of alignment.

He'd spent years in the Council archives. The oldest records — the ones that predated the current system, the ones that most wolves didn't know existed — contained references to wolves with compatibility scores above 99. The word Firstborn appeared in the margins of those documents, crossed out in some, circled in others. The records from that period were incomplete. Deliberately so, Aldric suspected. What had happened with those wolves had not ended well for anyone involved.

He didn't have the complete picture. But he had enough to know that a child scoring 99.97 percent was not a genetic curiosity. It was a signal. And signals, left unattended, became situations.

He called the courier at dawn. A young wolf from the communications unit — reliable, fast, and trained to deliver sealed documents without reading them. Standard protocol for classified traffic.

"Council Security Committee. Inner Session only. You speak to no one about the contents."

"Yes, Elder."

The courier left. The letter went with him — four paragraphs that would travel six hundred miles in two days and land on a table where three wolves would read it, look at each other, and begin making decisions that would change the shape of this operation.

Aldric stepped outside. The morning was cold and clean, the sky still gray at the edges where the sun hadn't reached. The camp was stirring — the after-action cleanup from the feral attack still in progress, soldiers moving with the careful energy of wolves who'd fought at night and hadn't slept since.

He looked south. Toward Ashenmoor.

The walls were visible in the morning light — rough stone, timber reinforcement, smoke from cooking fires rising in thin columns. A territory built by a woman who'd been thrown away by the system and had decided to build her own. There was something in that, Aldric could admit. Something stubborn and genuine that another man might have respected.

He didn't hate Rhea. He didn't hate Kieran. Hate was for wolves who still had the energy to take things personally. Aldric had spent that energy decades ago, and what remained was something quieter and more durable: the conviction that certain things existed because they needed to exist, and certain things didn't, and the distance between those categories was the only line that mattered.

Order required maintenance. It always had. Some wolves understood that and helped maintain it. Some didn't, and had to be worked around. And some — very rarely — carried something in their blood that made maintenance harder, that pushed against the boundaries of what the system could absorb.

The child carried something. Aldric could feel it from here, the way he'd felt it in the tribunal records, the way he'd felt it in the DNA number that sat in his mind and pressed and pressed.

He turned back to the camp. The day was beginning. There were operational reviews to attend, logistics to inspect, the steady machinery of a siege to observe. He would do all of it with the thoroughness that had defined his career.

And in two days, the letter would arrive, and the decisions would be made, and whatever the child carried would be assessed and cataloged and, if necessary, contained.

That was the work. It had always been the work.