Elena felt the room change before she understood it.
The Alpha was on his feet. His chair had scraped backward and was tipped slightly on one leg behind him. His Beta was up too, one hand outstretched, saying something Elena could not hear because there was a strange high hum in her ears that had started when the Alpha's eyes had gone gold and had not stopped. People in the rows around her were turning. A woman two seats down made a small sound — *oh.*
Diego's hand closed around Elena's wrist.
"Get up,"
he said. His voice was low.
"Elena. Get up. Now."
She didn't move.
The Alpha was walking toward her. He was not hurrying. He was moving the way a man moves through deep water, with all the room in the world, and his eyes had not left hers. The Beta was moving with him, talking to him, talking fast — *Alpha, the room, the cameras, Alpha* — and the Alpha was not listening. The Gammas at the corners of the room had straightened. One of them had taken a step forward and stopped, uncertain.
A werewolf woman in the second row whispered something. Elena heard the word *mate.*
The hum in her ears got louder.
She understood, in some fast cold part of her mind, before the rest of her caught up. She understood that the room had become a different room. She understood that the man walking toward her was no longer running a hearing and that none of the rules she had memorized for the next two minutes applied anymore. The folder was still on her lap. Her pitch was still in her mouth.
Diego pulled at her wrist. She didn't feel it.
The Alpha reached the third row.
He stopped at the end of it and turned and walked down the row toward her, and people pulled their knees aside without being asked, and Elena's body finally remembered itself and started to stand, and his hand came up and closed around her elbow before she was halfway out of the chair, and his other arm came under her knees, and the folder fell.
She heard it hit the floor.
She heard Diego shout.
The Alpha lifted her clean off the ground.