INCONVENIENTLY HUMAN

The network is human at its root.
Not werewolves. Not a pack gone rogue. Not even the kind of villain who believed in something and got it catastrophically wrong. The Conclave is a business. A seventy-year property operation built by one man who noticed that territorial uncertainty made land cheap and decided to make it cheaper, on purpose, for as long as anyone would let him.
No one let him stop.
Lila arrives in Draven Falls with eighty-seven properties, fourteen affected pack communities, a civil lawyer who keeps saying this is unprecedented, and a former police academy colleague she has not seen in twelve years waiting for her in a city that should not be in this investigation at all.
It is in this investigation.
There is also Calla Verrill, who has been managing the remaining operation and who, it turns out, has been quietly pointing the investigation in the right direction for four years. There is Fen Ashdown, who watched every network before hers get dismantled and built something specifically designed not to be. And there is a city called Ardenvale with a fifth Ashdown, a fifth operation, and a pack that has been fighting a manufactured border dispute for three generations without knowing who manufactured it.
The mate bond is complete. The Pack Advisory Council is forming. The reform proposal is almost ready.
The network is human at its root. So is she. This helps more than she expected.

She is not pack.
She is not Council.
She is the thing the operation was never designed to account for.