The chapter opens at Griffin Antiquities, a heavily secured gallery in the Old Square of Lunathion (Crescent City), where Bryce Quinlan works. Her best friend Danika Fendyr, a wolf shifter and leader of the Pack of Devils, arrives covered in dirt and dark fluid from breaking up a fight between a satyr and a nightstalker during her Thursday morning patrol. Bryce lets her in, bantering about Danika eating her leftover noodles and the lingering pain from matching tattoos they recently got while drunk. The gallery is owned by Jesiba Roga, a four-hundred-year-old former witch turned member of the House of Flame and Shadow, who is known for turning people into animals when irritated.

Danika stashes her famous heirloom sword—given to her by her grandfather, the Prime of the Valbaran wolves, bypassing her mother Sabine—in the supply closet alongside her gym bag, and asks to use the shower downstairs. The archives beneath the gallery house rare books and art, guarded by a fire sprite named Lehabah and a chimera named Syrinx. Bryce notices Danika's tense demeanor and deduces she has a meeting with the City Heads.

Danika reveals that Philip Briggs, a human rebel leader she and the Pack of Devils arrested for planning to bomb the White Raven nightclub, is being released on a bureaucratic technicality. Briggs is aligned with the Keres rebels and seeks to ignite a global war between humans and the magically gifted Vanir. Danika is furious and intends to argue against his release at the meeting with the seven City Heads, including Micah Domitus, the Archangel of Crescent City and ruler of Valbara.

Background on the city's power structure is woven in: the seven Heads each govern a district, with Micah presiding over all, answerable only to the six Asteri who rule the planet Midgard from the Eternal City. Humans have no Head and no representation, fueling sympathy for rebels like Briggs. The chapter also introduces the fraught family dynamics between Danika, her mother Sabine (Alpha of the Scythe Moon Pack and Prime Apparent), and her grandfather the Prime, whose decision to give the heirloom sword to Danika instead of Sabine created lasting resentment.

The chapter ends with Jesiba calling the gallery phone, having somehow learned Danika is there, and threatening to turn Danika into a lizard if she keeps using the supply closet as a personal locker.