"Give me the child. Not permanently. A temporary study period — three months, under controlled conditions. I'll personally guarantee her safety. No silver. No restraints. Assessment only. We need to understand what she carries and whether it can be managed within the existing framework."

He held up a hand before I could speak.

"In exchange: full territorial recognition. Your alliance legitimized under Council charter. Trade routes reopened — all of them, immediately. Kieran's defection charges dropped. Sera's rogue status dissolved. Every wolf under your protection granted full pack standing."

The room was silent. Torren at the door. Kieran beside me. Aldric across the table, his hands still flat, his eyes on mine.

Everything I'd fought for. Two years of wilderness. A year of building. Months of embargo and isolation and the slow starvation of a territory cut off from every supply line. All of it — resolved. Legitimized. Made permanent.

For the price of handing my daughter to the system that had classified her as a threat to civilization.

"Three months," I said. "Under controlled conditions. Assessed by specialists. Examined."

"By qualified researchers. Not military. Not handlers."

"You sent handlers."

Aldric didn't deny it. "I sent a containment team before I had all the information. I'm offering something different now."

"You're offering to study my daughter like a specimen. To determine whether her blood is manageable or whether it needs to be — what was the founding term? — cleansed."

The word landed. I watched it hit him. Not the way a blow lands — the way a fact lands. The fact that I knew. That the word I'd chosen wasn't random.

His expression didn't change. But the temperature behind it did.

"What did you say?"

"You heard me."

A silence. Longer than the previous ones. Aldric's hands hadn't moved from the table, but something in his posture had shifted — the shift of a man recalculating a conversation that had just moved into territory he hadn't prepared for.

"No," I said.

One word. The word that every part of me demanded. The word I'd carried since a seven-year-old fell asleep in a compound bedroom with a wooden wolf in her arms and silver threads in her hair, classified as the most dangerous thing alive by ten men in a stone room who'd never watched her draw.

"No."

Aldric studied me. The study of a man who'd expected this answer and had prepared a response.

"Rhea. The embargo will continue. Your allies will be pressured. Every neutral pack that's considered trading with you will receive a visit from a Council delegate explaining the cost of that decision. Eventually, your people will decide that one child — however loved — isn't worth starvation."

He said it without malice. Without threat. The tone of a doctor discussing prognosis — clinical, informed, carrying the weight of outcomes rather than intentions.

"They won't," I said.

"They will. Not because they don't love the child. Because they're hungry. And hungry wolves make rational decisions about survival."

"You've never met my wolves."

He paused again. The pause of a man who hadn't expected that particular response.

"I'm offering you everything you want," he said. "Recognition. Security. Legitimacy. All of it."

"Not all of it. You're asking for my daughter."

"I'm asking for three months."

"You're asking me to hand a seven-year-old to the same system that eliminated Carrier 31."

The number landed harder than the word. Carrier 31. The eight-year-old listed in the extermination order between a thirty-four-year-old woman and a forty-one-year-old man. Status: eliminated.

Aldric's hands moved for the first time. Not a large movement — a contraction of the fingers, the involuntary response of a man whose body had reacted to something his face was trying not to show.

"Where did you hear that designation?"

I stood. Looked at him. The man who'd spent sixty years maintaining a system whose foundations were soaked in the blood of forty-seven wolves — including children — who'd been killed because their blood made the wrong things possible.

"I didn't hear it. I read it. The extermination order. The operational directives. The follow-up procedures. The list of names and ages and the status column that says eliminated forty-seven times."

I let it settle.

"If you send another spy. Another containment team. Another envoy with a hidden condition. I'll release the records. Every pack. Every Alpha. Every wolf in the world will know what Council was built on. Not a governance document. An extermination order signed at an autumn gathering where people who trusted you were separated from the crowd and killed."

Aldric was very still. The stillness of a man whose world had just shifted — not dramatically, not with violence, but with the slow, tectonic movement of a foundation being exposed to weight it wasn't designed to carry from the outside.