Alpha

by Rachel Vincent

  Either I was wrong, or Dean had come looking for me.

  He stalked toward me, and my options raced through my head. I could run, but then he’d chase me, either for fun, or because he truly couldn’t control his cat’s instinct to pounce on anything resembling prey. Or because he didn’t want to control it.

  I could stand up to him and fight. But that would be stupid with the vote coming up. I couldn’t risk doing anything that would make my father look bad.

  I could yell for Marc and Jace, but that would label me even more a coward than running would.

  Or I could keep walking and hope Dean had orders not to touch me—surely Malone wouldn’t want to get his hands dirty, either, this close to the election.

  I walked on, and Dean altered his course to intercept me. “How many stitches did it take to hold your guts in?” I asked, clenching my fists in my coat pockets as he fell into step beside me, like we were old friends.

  “Nowhere near what it’ll take to sew you back together when I’m done with you.”

  “That sounds like a threat.” My voice came out cool and confident, and I hoped my racing heartbeat didn’t ruin the impression. Yes, I was a damn good fighter, but Dean outweighed me by more than a hundred pounds and had been training at least as long as I had. Probably much longer. And his grudge against me had moved far beyond the desire to see me dead—he wanted me broken and humiliated first. If he wasn’t under orders to play nice, we were both going to walk away from this one with new scars. Assuming we walked away at all.

  “Caught that, did you?” His shadow stretched past mine on the brown grass crunching beneath our feet. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna find yourself alone with me, and I’m gonna find out what it takes to make you scream like the bitch you are.”

  I shrugged without pulling my fists from my pockets, relieved to see that we were now within sight of the main lodge. “We’re alone now. What’s stopping you?” Aside from the dozen or so enforcers in the lodge ahead, well within hearing range, should one of us shout.

  “Formalities…” Dean growled, stepping in front of me to block my path. “But after the vote, the council’s gonna put you in your place, and I’m one of the toms who’s gonna keep you there.”

  I raised both brows in silent challenge, confident now that if he was going to throw a punch, he’d already have done it. “You have no authority over me, and the council can’t change that.” Even if Malone became council chair, he couldn’t reassign me to his own Pride, nor could he make my father hire Dean as one of our enforcers. No council chair had ever even tried anything like that. There was no precedent to support it.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, things are changing around here, and Cal knows exactly how to purge the impurities your Pride breeds so the rest of us can live clean.”

  Impurities? Motherfucker was talking about Marc! I pulled my fists from my pockets, but before I could act on my rash impulse, Dean was talking again.

  “Cal has plans, including consequences for little girls who step beyond their boundaries. And I just might be one of those consequences.”

  I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help it.

  Dean’s eyes flashed in anger and suddenly I realized his fury was completely impotent. He was goading me because Malone had him on a tight leash, at least for the moment.

  My fists relaxed. I propped my hands on my hips and looked up at him. “Can I see it?”

  He blinked, still scowling. “See what?”

  “Your scar.” His expression darkened like a sudden eclipse, and I let my gaze grow cold. “You want to hear me scream? Give it your best shot. But until then, every time you take off your shirt, you may as well be handing out my business card. I shoved my blade deep inside you and loved every single inch of it. When I can’t sleep at night, the memory of you screaming like a little bitch is my lullaby. And everybody knows exactly what that scar means—that you got your ass handed to you by a little girl. Again.”

  “You fucking bitch…” Dean picked me up by both arms, and my toes barely brushed the ground. It took every ounce of self-control I had to let myself hang there, instead of kicking.

  “Do it,” I said, staring straight into his eyes. Daring him. “Hit me. Throw me. Pick a fight, hours before the vote. I’m sure Malone will understand.”

  Dean growled. His hands tightened around my arms, and my fingers twitched when he squeezed a nerve.

  “You fucking moron, put her down!”

  I couldn’t see the speaker—couldn’t make myself look away from Dean while he held me like a rag doll—but I’d know Alex Malone’s voice anywhere.

  “You put a single bruise on her, and my dad will find new ways to skin a cat.”

  Dean dropped me, but his furious glare never left mine. I landed with my knees bent and barely resisted the urge to rub my arms where he’d held them. “He won’t get the chance. Touch me again, and I’ll gut you. And I don’t need a knife to do it.” Thanks to the partial Shift of one arm.

  Alex stepped around the Nordic-looking giant and sneered at me, then whirled on Dean. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Before Dean could answer, movement over his shoulder caught my eye. “Faythe?” Marc called, jogging toward us with Jace on his heels.

  “I’m fine,” I insisted, as they barreled to a stop on either side of me. “Dean and I were just comparing war wounds. He won. Someone cut him up pretty badly, huh, Colin?”

  Dean growled again. “Stay out of my way, bitch. Or I’ll make that scratch on your face look like a mercy.” He and Alex stomped back toward their cabin.

  “What the hell was that?” Marc demanded once they were gone.

  I shrugged. “Dean’s playing games, so I tried to draw a foul.”

  Jace frowned. “You wanted him to hit you?”

  I tossed my head toward the main lodge, where several forms were now visible in the windows. “With an audience to see him throw the first punch? Hell, yeah. We need every advantage we can get over Malone.”

  “Well, let’s aim for advantages that don’t involve any more stitches or bruises for you, okay?” Jace smiled, and Marc scowled, and as had become my habit, I stood between them. Alone, among company. Untouched, and frankly missing the easy physical contact most werecats thrive on.

  “Let’s just get the key.” Marc shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and headed for the lodge. “Your dad’s waiting,”

  Jace and I followed without a word, but that brief, awkward silence couldn’t compare to the one that greeted us when Marc pushed open the front door of the lodge. The main room was crowded with toms, and I didn’t find a friendly face among them. Milo Mitchell and Wes Gardner—Alphas of the northwest and Great Lakes Prides, respectively—sat opposite each other in worn armchairs, a battered coffee table separating them. Three of their enforcers sat on the matching couch, all glaring at us with identical expressions of disgust.

  We’d lost Gardner’s favor when we failed to execute Manx for killing his brother Jamey. Traumatized from having been kidnapped, raped, and held prisoner, Manx was on the run and pregnant at the time, and the fact that no other Alpha in the world would have killed a pregnant tabby did little to mollify Wes. He’d felt excluded from the process and had resented my father ever since.

  Milo Mitchell’s son Kevin was exiled from the south-central Pride around the same time, for sneaking strays into the territory for money. Mitchell’s hatred of all things Sanders was cemented when Marc killed Kevin during a fight in the free zone less than a month before the scheduled vote.

  I hovered in the doorway, overwhelmed by the waves of hostility crashing over me. Nearly everyone in that room hated me, and some of them hated Marc even more. Jace’s real enemies were in his birth Pride, but his stepfather’s allies were more than willing to dislike Jace based purely on his association with me and mine.

  “You have a lot of nerve showing up here,” a new voice growled from my left, and I turned to see Jerald Pierce—Parker’s father and Al
pha of the Great Plains territory—stalking toward me from the kitchen.

  “Thanks, I guess.” I shrugged and tried to let the animosity roll off my back, but it’s hard to stand tall in the face of pure loathing. Especially when so much of it is coming from a close friend’s father. No wonder Parker had opted to stay at the ranch, in the company of a growing collection of bottles. “Though I tend to think of it as a sense of duty and obligation to my Alpha.” My father. The strongest, most even-tempered and noble man I’d ever known.

  “What about honor?” Pierce demanded. “Aren’t you the one always talking about doing the right thing? Where the hell was that sense of honor when you were handing my son over to be slaughtered by a flock of dirty thunderbirds?”

  Well, at least it’s out in the open now…. Though that did nothing to break the tension in the room.

  “Faythe did what she had to do to save an innocent tabby’s life,” Marc insisted, flushed with anger, but obviously trying to keep his temper in check. “She made a decision only a real leader could have faced, and—”

  “Bite your tongue before I rip it out of your mouth!” Pierce roared, and Marc bristled like a tiger on alert. I moved closer to him, and to my relief—and surprise—Jace stepped up on his other side, ready to defend his Pridemate if necessary, in spite of their personal rivalry. “I always gave you the benefit of the doubt,” Pierce spat. “I even defended you when they said a stray could never be as good an enforcer as a Prideborn cat. But then you helped her lead my boy to the slaughter! What the hell is wrong with the bunch of you? How could you hand over a member of your own species to be pecked to death by a bunch of giant buzzards?”

  I wanted to argue. To defend myself and my actions. But we’d discussed it with my father and had agreed not to comment on what happened to Lance Pierce. Including the fact that I’d ordered Marc to execute Lance to spare him from being eaten alive by the birds. Malone was sure to declare that a murder, rather than a mercy.

  “I guess Cal’s right about strays. You’re genetically inferior. You didn’t give a damn about my son because you’re not even the same species. And you!” Pierce turned his dark-eyed fury on me, and I almost took a step back, floored by the depth of his hatred. “You’re an abomination. Turning your nose up at your real duty and obligation to hand over one of your own in cold blood. I feel sorry for your father, saddled with such a self-righteous whore for a daughter. Refusing to give him any heirs, yet flaunting two lovers in front of the whole world. You truly have no shame.”

  I reeled like I’d been slapped. My cheeks flamed. I could actually see bright red patches of skin at the bottom of my field of vision. And the double standard burned like hellflames. If there was an enforcer in the room who’d only been with one woman, then I was Garfield.

  “Jerald.” Paul Blackwell didn’t even raise his voice, but every head in the room turned toward him, and Pierce went silent instantly. The senior Alpha and acting council chair stood in the kitchen doorway, leaning on a worn cane, looking every bit of his seventy-something years. “You’ll have a chance to air your grievances, but this is not it.”

  Pierce nodded angrily, but refused to back down, so I had to step around him to accept the key ring Blackwell held out to me. “Tell your father we vote at seven sharp. If he has any preliminary business, he’ll need to present it before that.”

  The slight arch in Blackwell’s brow was so subtle surely no one else noticed it. But I knew what that meant. If we were going to play the ace up our collective sleeve, we’d have to do it soon.

  I nodded, clenching the key ring, then turned and marched out the front door with Marc and Jace on my heels.

  “If this doesn’t work, we are so fucked,” Jace whispered, as we walked across the grass in a straight line. “They’d string us all up now, if they could. There’s no way any of those three are gonna switch sides.”

  “It’ll work,” Marc insisted, for once forgetting to growl at his rival. “It has to.”

  I could only nod, still stunned by Pierce’s speech. My hand strayed to the left side of my coat, beneath which I could barely feel a long, straight ridge. Two thunderbird feathers, stained with Lance Pierce’s blood. Evidence that Lance had killed the young bird, and that Malone had tried to frame us for the crime, simultaneously weakening our defenses and diverting the aftermath from his own Pride.

  Those feathers were the key to our preemptive strike. We hadn’t come for the vote. We’d come to prevent it—by charging Calvin Malone with treason.

  Four

  “We have to tell my dad.” I shoved my freezing hands into my coat pockets and sighed. My breath hung on the air, a thin white cloud I walked through with my next step.

  “That Jerald Pierce has lost his fucking mind?” Jace shrugged on my left, always a few inches closer to me than Marc would let himself be. “The sooner, the better. Telling Parker will be the hard part.”

  “He’s already expecting it,” I said, thinking of his distraught drinking binge.

  Malone’s cabin was in sight up ahead, and I wondered if any more of his psychotic henchmen were ready to rumble. After being called a whore in front of half of the Territorial Council, a good fight might be just what I needed to purge some seriously unhealthy resentment and aggression.

  But everything looked quiet as we approached. Pity.

  “But I wasn’t talking about Pierce.” Damn it, they were going to make me say it. “We have to tell my dad about us. This.” I stopped walking and pulled my hands from my pockets to make a gesture encompassing all three of us. “Whatever this is. Now.”

  “There is no us,” Marc said, his voice low and heavy. He met my gaze frankly and left two feet of cold, empty space between his body and mine. “There’s you and me, or there’s you and him.” He waved one hand toward Jace, and I flinched.

  “I know.” I sighed. And after Pierce’s public broadcast, I was hyperaware that if I didn’t make a decision soon, either Marc or Jace would take the choice out of my hands. “But my point is that Pierce just told Blackwell—and the whole world—exactly what’s going on.” And that came as a surprise, because we’d fully expected our enemies to keep the secret until revealing it would do us the most damage. Which should have given us time to break the news first. “And if my dad finds out from anyone other than us—other than me—well…I can’t do that to him.”

  Dealing with my catastrophic love life was the last thing he needed at the moment, but learning about it in front of the entire council would be much, much worse.

  “So we’ll tell him.” Jace shrugged again. He’d only agreed to keep our relationship quiet out of respect for Marc. Marc was the one really suffering, and that would only get worse once everyone knew he’d been cuckolded.

  “No, I’ll tell him.” I couldn’t drag Marc in front of my father and announce that I’d cheated on him. And couldn’t let Jace see how strongly my father disapproved of him at my side. That wouldn’t be fair to either of them. I would take the fallout alone. “I just need you guys to keep everyone else out of the way for a few minutes so I can tell him in private.”

  Marc looked like he wanted to throw up. I reached out for him, but he backed away. “You want me to entertain our allies so you can tell your dad you’re not sure you want me anymore?” Pain swam in his golden brown eyes, and when I couldn’t figure out what to say to make it better, he shook his head slowly and took off across the cold dead grass toward our cabin.

  I ached to go after him, but he wanted to be alone, and I understood why.

  “He’ll be okay.” Jace tried to pull me close, but I stepped out of his reach, apologizing with my eyes. If I couldn’t touch Marc, I couldn’t touch him, even for innocent comfort. Both because that wouldn’t be fair to Marc, and because where comfort was concerned, there didn’t seem to be much innocence left between me and Jace.

  “I’m not sure any of us will be,” I whispered, as we passed Malone’s lodgings.

  The rental van was parked in front of ou
r cabin, with Umberto Di Carlo and my father in the front seats. As we approached, the sliding door opened and Mateo Di Carlo got out to give me a hug, while two of his fellow enforcers nodded in greeting.

  “Hey, Faythe, how are you holding up?”

  “I’m fine, Teo. Thanks.” People asked me that all the time now, and Jace got the same questions. My brother Ethan—Jace’s lifelong best friend—was only three weeks in the ground, and we’d seen so much tragedy and disaster since his death that we’d had to put true mourning on hold. But his absence still snuck up on me at night, when I was lonely and needed someone to talk to. In many ways, Ethan had been the soul of our family, much as my mother was the heart, and his death had seared a hole through my own chest. Sometimes I thought we’d never truly recover, as a family or as a Pride.

  “Did Marc come through here?” I asked, as my father rounded the front of the van.

  “I thought he was with you.” He took the key I offered while the guys helped Bert Di Carlo with the luggage.

  “He was. He just…needed some time to himself. He’ll be back soon.”

  He raised one graying eyebrow, then nodded and unlocked the front door. I followed him into the living room, glancing around at the familiar worn furniture and outdated kitchen appliances. It looked about the same as it had when we’d left—was it really just three months ago?—and without my werecat’s nose, I couldn’t even smell the residual blood.

  Ethan’s blood. My brother had been gored here, defending me and Kaci. And now he was gone. For a moment I got lost in the memory, and in the pain of my own loss. So much had changed in so short a time. Very little of it for the better.

  “Faythe?” My father frowned at me as the guys trooped in with our luggage. “Quarters will be a little cramped, since we’re doubling up.” Last time, only four territories had been represented; this time, all ten Alphas were coming, with enforcer entourages. “I’m putting you, Marc, and Jace in the far bedroom, but I’m guessing Jace won’t mind taking the couch, if you think that would be…more prudent.”