Roman Vance took his coffee on the east terrace at seven, the way he had for twelve years.
Black, no sugar, in the same heavy ceramic mug his father had used before him. He stood at the railing in his shirtsleeves and watched the woods at the bottom of the lawn shift from grey to gold as the sun came up. Forty acres of Vance land. His grandfather had bought it, his father had kept it, and he had inherited the whole of it twelve years ago at twenty-two, the same week he had won the Alpha challenge that put the pack in his hand.
The estate was quiet around him. He liked it quiet. His housekeeper came in at six and was gone by ten; his groundskeeper kept to the south side of the property; he had no one to be loud for. He had wanted the house empty since the day he had moved into it.
The phone in his pocket buzzed. Marcus, his Beta, with the morning briefing. He read it standing at the railing. South Side hearing at nine. Twenty-three petition slots. Capital budget already allocated through spring. He would say no, politely, fifteen times.
For eight years Marcus had run the South Side hearings in his place. The Beta carried the binder, read the answers, took the heat. Roman read every briefing — every petition, every denial, every name — but he did not sit in the room. There was no rule that said an Alpha had to. There was a strong tradition, in pack governance, that an Alpha who put his own face on every denial would not stay Alpha for long. So Marcus went, and Roman signed, and the system worked.
Today was different.
Marcus had asked him three weeks ago to come in person. Not for any one petition. For the optics. There were rumblings in the Ashbrook press about an absentee Alpha, and the Interpack Session was a month away, and a column had run in the Sentinel that had used the word *aloof.* Marcus did not like the word *aloof.* Marcus had said, *one morning, Alpha, you sit in the room yourself, you let them see your face, you let them photograph you saying no, and the column goes away.* Roman had agreed because Marcus was usually right about this kind of thing.
So today, for the first time in eight years, the Alpha himself would sit the hearing.
A heron lifted off the lake at the bottom of the lawn and crossed the sky in slow strokes.
There was a thought he had on these mornings sometimes. It came when the light was right and the house was quiet and the coffee was hot in his hand, and he thought it without bitterness, the way a man notices a chip on a plate he otherwise likes.
*It would be nice to have someone here.*
That was all. He thought it, and the thought lay there for a moment, and then it left him. He was thirty-four. He had stopped expecting his mate at twenty-six and had stopped thinking about her at thirty-two, and these days the thought arrived like an old neighbour he no longer had business with — a nod, a smile, a passing. Most werewolves found their mates by twenty-five. He had not. It was a shame. It was not a tragedy. He had his pack, his territory, his seat on the Interpack Council, his land, and his bed was never empty when he did not want it to be.
He drank the last of the coffee and set the mug on the railing.
He had read five hundred of these briefings. He had never sat one in the South Side.
He had no reason to think his first time in the room would be different from the binder.