**Savannah’s POV**
The chandelier light followed me across the ballroom floor, and the whispers moved with it.
I kept my pace even.
Chin level.
Eyes forward.
The same way I walked into every difficult thing — like I’d already decided the outcome and was simply arriving at it.
Jack Maxwell appeared in my path for the second time that evening.
This time he had an expression on that was attempting remorse.
Practicing it, more accurately.
“About earlier,” he said, the champagne on his breath mixing with expensive cologne, “I may have been out of line.” He smiled, and the smile had nothing to do with apology.
“Let me make it up to you.
One drink.
We could talk combat technique — I’ve heard you’re impressive.”
“Thank you,” I said pleasantly, “but I need to get back to my son.”
I went around him the way you go around a piece of furniture.
I made it another twenty feet.
Then they were in front of me.
Three She-wolves in formal gowns, Blue Blood Pack markers woven through each of their upswept hairstyles, positioned in a loose half-arc that was too evenly spaced to be accidental.
The one in front moved forward as I approached, that particular walk that announces itself — the walk of someone who has never once in their life questioned their right to occupy space.
She didn’t say anything.
She didn’t need to.
Her fingernail caught the side seam of my skirt, and she kept walking past me.
The sound of silk tearing in a ballroom has a specific quality — clean and irreversible, like a sentence that can’t be taken back.
The tear ran upward from the hem, maybe eight inches, and the moon-silver fabric frayed at the edges where it split, the fine threads catching the chandelier light as they came apart.
“Silver was never really your color anyway,” she said.
My muscles had already done the calculation.
Angle, distance, the exact amount of force required.
No Diana, no wolf — but six years of combat training lived in my body independent of any of that, and my body had its own opinions about what happened next.
Then the air changed.
An Alpha presence rolled in from my left like a pressure front, the kind that doesn’t announce itself with volume but with density — the quality that makes the air in a room physically heavier, that reorganizes the people in it before they’ve consciously registered why they’re moving.
I felt it across my skin.
Half the ballroom took an involuntary half-step backward.
Jack Maxwell, still somewhere behind me, shifted his weight and said nothing.
Declan came through the crowd.
He didn’t raise his voice.
He didn’t need to.
He looked at the three She-wolves once, a single sweep of those amber-brown eyes, and all three of them found somewhere else to direct their attention with impressive speed and then quietly relocated themselves to a different part of the room.
Then his gaze dropped to the tear in my dress.
He didn’t pause, didn’t ask, didn’t check whether this was welcome.
He shrugged off his jacket in one motion and it was on my shoulders before I’d finished processing that he was going to do it.
The fabric settled warm and heavy — the residual heat of him moving through the silk immediately, pine and mountain air and something underneath that was purely, distinctly his.
My fingers touched the lapel before I’d told them to.
“You didn’t need to do that,” I said.
My voice came out lower than I’d aimed for, rougher at the edges.
“I had it handled.”
“I know.” His voice was quiet, pitched for only the space between us, and when his eyes met mine there was something in them that made my heartbeat do something I had limited vocabulary for.
“But you don’t always have to handle everything alone.”
I opened my mouth to answer.
My feet left the floor.
One moment I was standing, the next I was not — his arm was behind my back, his other hand steady at my waist, and I was against his chest with my face turned into the fabric of his dress shirt. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
His heartbeat was directly under my ear.
Steady, strong, and — I registered this with a precision I hadn’t invited — slightly faster than it should have been.
“What are you *doing*—” I started, aiming for sharp and landing somewhere considerably less certain.
“I can walk perfectly well on my own—”
“Your dress is torn.” His voice resonated through his chest into the side of my face, and something along my spine responded to the vibration in a way that was deeply inconvenient.
“And you’ve already handled enough battles tonight.” His arm adjusted, redistributing my weight with an ease that made the small, embarrassingly honest part of me register that being held like this required absolutely no effort on his part.
“Let me take you out.”
The ballroom had gone the specific quiet that happens when everyone in a room has the same thought simultaneously and no one says it aloud.
I was aware of it.
I was aware of all of it — the audience, the implication, the spectacle of Iron Ridge’s heir carrying a wolf-less instructor out of a formal Alliance event in his jacket.
I was also aware of his heartbeat under my ear.
Of the warmth of his jacket around my shoulders, the scent of him moving through it, that combination of pine and cold mountain air that I had been carefully not thinking about since the terrace.
It was different from memory.
Closer.
More specific.
Something in me recognized it and went quiet and I did not examine what that meant.
Somewhere in the direction of the VIP table, I heard the clear, percussive sound of crystal hitting marble.
A champagne glass, by the register of the break.
The specific sound of something let go rather than dropped.
Celeste.
I heard it.
I did not look.
What I felt was Declan’s heartbeat — steady underneath everything else, that slightly elevated rhythm that matched nothing about his outward composure — and the warmth of his jacket that had been against his skin for hours, moving through the thin fabric of the silver dress.
Seeping in.