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embrace. He gave my back a gentle pat before releasing me.
    “Sit down.” He waved at the chairs around the table and resumed his original seat.
    Murphy and I sat next to each other, facing the fireplace. Its radiating heat was warm on the side of my face as I turned my head to look at Allerton.
    “I’ve arranged a dinner tonight here with Riverglow,” he informed us. My stomach knotted at the thought of having to eat with them. I’d seen them nearly three months ago at the Great Gathering in Paris, but they had snubbed me.
    I still burned with humiliation at the way Callie’s, Vaughn’s and Peter’s eyes had glazed over and they’d pretended not to see me when I’d called out to them in the reception area at the chateau. It had been an instinctive greeting, born of past familiarity. For a second the two intervening years had been wiped away and it had been like seeing family.
    I’d expected to be snubbed by Jonathan and Nora, but not the others. I don’t know why, because they’d been explicitly clear after the accident that they’d blamed me, but somehow I’d hoped that they’d had second thoughts, that maybe when they saw me they’d think family too.
    “There have been some changes in the pack membership and leadership since you’ve left them, Constance.” Allerton’s blue eyes met mine across the gleaming conference table. When I refused to be drawn, he smiled a little and continued as if he’d never paused to allow me an opportunity to participate.
    “The main reason they went to the Great Gathering was to find some new blood for the pack. Nora had a stillborn son last year and Callie’s had several miscarriages since she, Vaughn and Peter took Alpha status. It was the same thing the first time they were Alpha, when you and Grey joined the pack. You remember. It was after one particularly bad miscarriage that the triad stepped aside as Alpha. You and Grey were approached but I recall being told you turned it down.”
    Beside me, Murphy shifted in his chair so he could stare at me. Passing up an opportunity to be Alpha was probably not something he’d ever contemplated before. In big packs such as Mac Tire, the position was highly coveted and campaigned for because not every female would get the chance before her fertility cycle ceased. Bigger packs tended to have shorter Alpha timeframes—five years was the usual span. However, smaller packs such as Riverglow tended to rotate the Alpha status. It wasn’t unheard of for duos and triads to have multiple opportunities. Grey had turned down Alpha status because of Jonathan’s jealousy. He’d known the position would eventually come to us and we were young, in our early twenties, and had plenty of fertility time left.
    Pack women could only give birth once. Live or stillborn, if they carried a pregnancy to the end, they would become barren after the birth. Twins were slightly more common than singles.
    While triads could be made up of two men and one female, most of them consisted of two women and one man in order to give two women the opportunity to bear a child at the same time. Only Alphas could have children. All the other women in the pack took birth control or had to have abortions.
    I think it was both evolution’s and our own cultural way to avoid detection by the Others. Our population stayed small and underground. Secret.
    Again Councilor Allerton waited for me to say something. I admit I felt a surge of sympathy for both Nora and Callie. Callie was over forty, near the end of her childbearing years and Nora, who was three years older than me, was now barren.
    They were at risk, of course, of losing their bond mates, who still had the chance to bond with a fertile female and become Alpha so they could procreate. A lot of us created such strong connections with our bond mates, very few left in search of a chance to be Alpha and to have a child. The ambitious ones would, but normally love conquered ambition.
    I knew Peter would stick with