**Declan’s POV**
When she walked in, I was already forming a rough picture of how this conversation would end.
Then she put the resignation letter on my desk.
One clean motion, no hesitation, no dramatic pause.
Just placed it down and stood back, and the finality of it was so complete it was almost impressive.
“No,” I said.
Savannah’s eyebrow moved.
Barely — the smallest possible expression of a question, compressed into a single muscle.
“That’s not your decision to make,” she said.
“Actually, it is.” I stood up and came around the desk, closing the distance between us until we were in the range where a conversation meant something.
Not crowding her — she wouldn’t have tolerated that, and I knew it — just close enough that we were talking to each other instead of across furniture.
“The training base needs you.
These young wolves need you.
Rogue attack frequency is up forty percent in the last quarter, the Alliance is expanding the training program, and you are the most effective combat instructor we have right now.”
“You just sided against me in the parking lot—”
“I handled that badly,” I said.
Straight out, no cushioning, no diplomatic softening.
I’d thought about it from the moment she’d walked away and I’d had approximately four seconds of clarity before Celeste started talking again, and I’d known immediately.
“It won’t happen again.
I won’t interfere with your methods.”
She looked at me.
Those dark green eyes doing that thing they did — running a full assessment, cataloguing everything, deciding what to do with it.
There was skepticism in there.
There was something else too, something I would have liked more time to look at.
“One condition,” she said.
“Name it.”
“No more forced apologies.” She moved half a step forward.
Close enough now that I could see the different depths of green in her irises, the way the color shifted from darker at the edge to something lighter near the center.
“No compromising my judgment to satisfy anyone.
Including Iron Ridge’s Alpha heir.”
Dante made a sound in my chest that was unmistakably approval.
Low and certain and immediate.
“Agreed.” I held out my hand.
“That’s settled then.”
She looked at my hand.
There was a pause.
Short — the kind that would be invisible to anyone not paying close attention.
Then she reached out and took it.
It should have been straightforward.
Professional.
The physical punctuation mark at the end of a negotiation.
I have shaken hands with hundreds of people in my life.
Pack members, Alliance officials, rival Alpha heirs at formal summits.
I know exactly what a handshake feels like.
This was not that.
Whatever traveled from her palm into mine went up my arm before I had processed that it was happening.
Heat wasn’t the right word for it.
Current was closer.
Dante lunged toward it with a force that hit me somewhere behind the sternum, and I had a genuine moment where the floor felt uncertain beneath my feet.
Savannah’s pupils expanded.
Just slightly.
Just enough that I caught it because I was watching her face and I was watching it closely.
Her breathing changed.
One beat off its previous rhythm.
We held the handshake for one full second longer than it should have lasted.
Then she pulled her hand back.
Clean, controlled, the way she did everything — no fumbling, no acknowledgment of what had just moved between us.
Just her hand returning to her side like nothing unusual had occurred.
“Good evening, Declan.”
She turned, and her phone rang.
The shift in her was immediate.
Not the professional neutral she wore around the training base, not the cold front she deployed in difficult conversations.
Something genuinely different moved into her voice when she answered, something warmer than anything I’d heard from her since she arrived.
“Leo?” A pause, listening.
“No, you’re not interrupting.” Another pause, and something in her expression shifted — somewhere between amusement and the exasperation of someone who knows they’re being managed and can’t quite resist it.
“What?
The Alpha Heir’s Ball—” She stopped walking.
“Leo.
That’s not my kind of event anymore. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
I don’t think—”
I was very still on my side of the room.
I watched her stand near the window, profile to me, listening to whatever Leo was saying with an expression I hadn’t seen her wear before.
The resistance was there, but underneath it something was giving way, millimeter by millimeter, the way ground softens in rain.
“That’s not a good argument,” she said.
Then, after a longer pause: “That’s also not a good argument.” Then, after what was clearly Leo at his most persistent: “Fine.” She exhaled, and the word came out caught between resignation and something that wasn’t quite unwillingness.
“Next Friday.
I’ll go.”
She ended the call and turned back around.
The warmer thing was already being folded back up and put away.
Professional Savannah, the one who looked at me like she was reading terms and conditions.
“Anything else?” she said.
“Director.”
The word landed with the exact right amount of deliberate distance.
Not rude.
Precise.
A reminder, placed with a professional’s accuracy, of what the boundary was and where it sat.
I turned to the window.
The ridge outside had caught the last of the evening light, the line of it going amber-gold against the darkening sky.
Dante was still moving in my chest, not settled, not willing to let go of whatever that handshake had stirred up in him.
Restless and insistent in the way he only got when something mattered.
The Alpha Heir’s Ball was next Friday.
A formal Alliance event.
Every significant pack represented, every major family in attendance.
The kind of event where appearances meant something and who walked in with whom got noticed and remembered.
She was going.
I looked at the resignation letter still sitting on my desk.
Looked at the window.
Looked back at the door she was standing in front of, waiting for my answer with that particular quality of patience that was really controlled impatience wearing a calm expression.
“Nothing else,” I said.
“Good night.”