Alpha

  “I don’t know…” Jace began. “If the testimony works and Cal gets tossed out, we won’t need to fight, right?”

  “We will if he decides to take his position back by force,” Marc said. “We already know he’s been stockpiling both enforcers and allies, so we have to be prepared to defend against the backlash.”

  I thought for a moment, pulling a tissue from my pocket to wipe my dripping nose. “So, if we’re going to fight anyway, asking one of the thunderbirds to testify is pointless. Especially if it means giving them up as allies in battle.”

  “Exactly.” Marc nodded firmly, still speaking in a whisper. “The way I see it, we gave peace a chance, and peace screwed us over. It’s time to get serious. Time to avenge Ethan—” Malone had sent the contingent that killed Ethan and tried to take Kaci “—and put an end to Malone’s tyranny permanently.”

  “And for that we need to officially enlist our special forces.” I nodded, pleased with the direction our discussion had taken. “We can leave tonight and be there first thing in the morning.”

  “Where you going?” Colin Dean stepped around the corner of the cabin, and I froze. My enthusiasm for the road trip/assignment flared into a blaze of anger in my chest that eerily mimicked vicious heartburn. “Romantic getaway to ease the sting of total failure? Just the three of you, or are you hoping to add a fourth? Rumor has it you’re pretty hard to keep satisfied. Right, Marc?”

  Marc snarled and lunged for Dean. I grabbed him from behind as Jace stepped in front of Dean to protect him from Marc, and Marc from assault charges.

  “Marc, stop!” I shouted, digging my heels into the frozen ground to hold him back. “He’s not worth it!”

  Dean only laughed, inches from Jace’s chest, because he refused to back down, either to avoid admitting he was in any danger, or because he wanted to fight Marc—so long as Marc took the first swing.

  Unless someone was seriously injured, occasional one-on-one brawls were typically overlooked by those in charge. Sometimes tempers had to be vented to avoid later, more vicious explosions, and honestly, sometimes horsing around just got out of hand. But Marc couldn’t afford to give Malone any reason to kick him out. And Dean damn well knew it.

  “What, you’ll share with Jace but not with me?” Dean raised one taunting eyebrow at Marc. “What happened to ‘the more, the merrier’?”

  “I should have cut your tongue out when I had the chance,” Jace growled, glaring up at Dean from inches away.

  “Yeah.” Dean nodded, grinning. “You should have. Then neither one of you would have to hear how hard her nipple got when I traced it with the tip of my blade. I’m sure she was just cold. It probably had nothing to do with the fact that she liked having my hands on her. Not to mention my knife.” He glanced at me, and my fingers twitched around Marc’s arm as I briefly considered letting him go. I really wanted to see Dean’s face broken again. Or maybe his neck…

  “Isn’t that right? You could have stopped me anytime you wanted, which either means you were too proud to beg, or you liked it.” Dean’s focus shifted to Jace again as Marc’s arm tensed beneath my hands and I remembered that we couldn’t afford to take the bait. “You could have stopped it, too, but you let me cut her. What kind of man lets the love of his life get carved up like a fucking turkey while he watches?”

  Jace’s fists clenched at his sides, but he kept his mouth shut. I didn’t have that much self-control.

  “If you ever come near me with a knife again, I will kill you.” My voice was calm, and clear, and soft, revealing none of my hidden panic at the memory of Dean wielding a blade, yet all of my cold determination to see him dead. I was kind of impressed, and so was Marc. I could tell because he relaxed a bit beneath my grip.

  Dean’s eyes narrowed. “The rules are changing, and you’re in for a very rude awakening, little puss. I hope you do resist. I hope you have to be broken like a wild horse. And by the time I’m done with you, you’re going to wish I’d slit your throat, instead of your cheek.” He glanced at the window over our heads, smiled coldly, and turned to walk off toward his own cabin, as if he hadn’t a fear in the world.

  “If I accomplish nothing else in my life, I will see that bastard bleed out,” Marc breathed.

  “He’s mine,” I insisted, as Jace fell in at my side to watch Dean go.

  The front door opened on my left, and my father emerged, followed by Di Carlo and his enforcers. “What happened?”

  “Just a little fraternizing with the enemy,” Jace said. “Nothing we can’t handle.”

  “Dean’s trying to bait us into a fight.” I tucked my arm into my father’s. At least I could accept his comfort without pissing anyone off or making anyone jealous. “What’s up with Malone?” After the official vote, the Alphas had kicked the enforcers out so the new chair could meet with his council for the first time ever. “Is he already plotting to take over the world?”

  “One Pride at a time.” My father sighed as we turned toward our cabin, the path lit only by cold, white moonlight. “He came prepared with a list of ideas to ‘restructure’ things.”

  “Steal from the poor to feed the rich?” Marc asked from my right, and I could practically taste Jace’s frustration at having lost a place at my side.

  “Something like that.” My dad rubbed his forehead with his free hand and lowered his voice. “If his new proposals pass, this is going to get unpleasant very quickly.”

  “We were just thinking the same thing.” I glanced from Marc to Jace, and they both nodded for me to continue. “We think it’s time to call in the reserves. If we leave first thing in the morning, we can be in New Mexico by tomorrow night.”

  My father stopped and faced us, and Di Carlo and his enforcers fanned out around us all. “You think we should strike here? On the mountain?”

  I shrugged, trying to look more confident than I felt. “It’s neutral territory, so Malone doesn’t have home field advantage. And if you call in our men while we’re gone, they could be here by the time we get back with the birds, which means we’ll have Malone vastly outnumbered. It could all be over relatively quickly and easily.” Assuming he didn’t catch wind of what we were doing and bring more of his own men.

  My father considered for a moment, then looked to Di Carlo for an opinion. “We’ve never fought on a large scale in neutral territory.” So far, war had always come in the form of a territorial invasion. “If this maneuver didn’t occur to us, it probably won’t occur to him.”

  I nodded, eagerness creeping up from my toes to tingle in the rest of my body. “And if we don’t make a move soon, we’re going to lose the opportunity. Malone’ll do everything possible to handicap us, starting with exiling Marc.” One of our very best fighters. “Again.” Or worse.

  Di Carlo frowned. “I agree, but are we really ready to go to war this soon?”

  “We’ve been ready,” Jace said. “We just need to call in a little favor and get the rest of our men in place.” Only a few enforcers apiece had accompanied the Alphas to the cabin complex.

  “I don’t see that we have any choice,” my father said. “Calvin’s already talking about supplementing the council chair’s budget, for operating costs. I have no doubt he’ll spend that money hiring more enforcers. Add his allies’ troops to that, and our chances of a victory decrease with every day that we give them to prepare.”

  Di Carlo finally nodded. “But we need to make sure Aaron and Rick are on board before you three head for New Mexico. Unfortunately, we won’t have time to discuss it all tonight. We reconvene in fifteen minutes.”

  “How about over lunch tomorrow, in our cabin?” my father asked.

  Di Carlo thought for a moment, then nodded again. “I’ll pass it along, and hopefully you three can leave that afternoon.”

  My father glanced from me to Marc, then to Jace. “I’ll fly Vic and Brian out to replace you.”

  I couldn’t resist a smile. It was finally happening. Malone was going to pay, and a mere pound of fl
esh would not suffice. Justice demanded all one hundred eighty pounds of him, laid out cold and dead for the earth to reclaim.

  Eight

  “I’d call him crazy, if he weren’t so well organized.” My uncle Rick Wade leaned back in the ratty armchair, his furrowed forehead reflecting the disappointment on every other face in the room. Including my own, no doubt. “Malone knew he was going to win, and he came prepared. Some of his proposals are obviously dictatorial, but they’ve been phrased very carefully, so they’re hard to reasonably object to.”

  “Yeah, he’s good at maintaining the illusion of integrity. It’s like an evil superpower.” I flipped up the chipped, stainless-steel lever on the kitchen faucet, and water poured into the huge pot. It would take forever to boil on the outdated electric stove, but spaghetti was the easiest meal we knew how to cook in large quantities, and we had extra mouths to feed—my uncle and Aaron Taylor, plus Vic and Brian, who had flown in that morning to replace me, Jace, and Marc, under the assumption we’d be leaving soon for New Mexico.

  At the stove, Marc stirred two skillets of ground beef. He was stiff and still irritated because I’d spent the night on the couch, rather than sleep between him and Jace, or try to convince one of them to take the couch.

  Jace looked up from the slices of French bread he was buttering and gave me a small smile. At the moment, anything that pissed Marc off made him happy—Jace was still mad about me wearing eau de Marc the night before.

  “And you don’t think recruiting testimony from the thunderbirds would do any good?” my uncle asked, looking less than convinced.

  “I think we’ve moved beyond political solutions, Rick,” my father said from the chair opposite his brother-in-law. “We always knew it would come to this.”

  “And it’s about damn time,” Umberto Di Carlo rumbled from somewhere beyond my line of sight. “I was tired of playing nice, anyway. Everyone knows Cal ordered the maneuver that got Ethan killed and we know he’s responsible for the thunderbird attack that killed Charley Eames and Jake Taylor—”

  Aaron Taylor blinked at the mention of his dead son, and I looked away from his pain, because it resurrected my own.

  “—and almost cost us Kaci,” Di Carlo continued. And that was without even mentioning the strays he’d had tagged and/or murdered in the free zone, which had almost gotten Marc killed. “It’s time he pays for all of that. I say let’s quit dragging our feet and make it a real consequence. One he can’t live with.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” My father’s comment was so soft I almost missed it, and when I glanced up, I saw him staring at the coffee table, his hands templed beneath his chin. He was eager for justice, but no Alpha in his right mind would ask for war without considering the consequences. The possible losses.

  “I want to see him pay for Jake’s death. But before we jump into anything, I need to know that we’re all on the same page,” Aaron Taylor said, as I turned off the water and hauled the half-filled pot out of the sink. “We’re talking about war. About attacking another Alpha and his allies…”

  “We’re talking about killing Calvin Malone.” I left the pot on the counter and crossed the kitchen to the doorway, where I could see the whole room. The Alphas had grouped around the coffee table, and Di Carlo’s enforcers lined the far wall. “We’re talking about removing him from power by removing him from life. That’s what he deserves, and that’s the only permanent solution to the growing problem he represents.”

  Taylor leaned forward in his chair, eyeing first me, then his fellow Alphas. “Yes, but full-scale war? If Jake’s death has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t afford to lose that many toms.”

  “Neither can we afford to leave Malone in charge,” my father pointed out in his quiet, reasonable tone. “The loss of both lives and liberty would be devastating.”

  “Yes, but why not target only Malone?” my uncle asked from the couch.

  I picked up an open box of spaghetti from the counter. “We could do it that way, and personally I’d love to be there when Malone takes his last breath. But that’s only postponing the inevitable. What do you think the Appalachian Pride and its allies will do if we assassinate their leader? What would we do, if they killed one of you?”

  Uncle Rick sighed. “Full-scale war. But we can’t turn back from that, once it starts.”

  “Of course not.” My father dropped his hands and sat straighter, drawing all attention his way while I set the pot on the stove and turned the burner on high. “That’s the point. The direction the council is headed is unacceptable, and it’s going to take something drastic to set it straight again.”

  “I agree.” Uncle Rick’s shoulders slumped beneath the burden of responsibility they must all have been feeling. “All I’m saying is that, after this, it’ll never be the same. The council may never be truly united again.”

  “It hasn’t been for quite some time,” Di Carlo pointed out. “And our failure to act won’t change that. If we start a war to get rid of Malone, we may destroy the council in the process. But if we let things continue, he’ll restructure the council to suit his own needs, effectively destroying it himself.”

  “He’s already started that,” Taylor interjected, and his heavy gaze landed on me with particular weight.

  “Whoa, what does that mean?” I glanced at the pot of water, then decided that food could wait. The council had met until late the night before and reconvened early in the morning, without enforcers once again. Evidently the rest of us had missed more than just the design of Malone’s new stationery.

  My father took his glasses off to polish the lenses, and only once he had them back in place did he meet my gaze. “Calvin had an entire list of policy changes ready to go before the vote, and since then, he’s been introducing one after another. So far, about a third of them have passed, and each time, Paul Blackwell has been the swing vote.”

  Dread clenched my stomach like an iron vise.

  Unfortunately, even with the new unspoken hostility between them, Blackwell and Malone still shared a few ideological tenets, such as the belief that strays had no place within a Pride, and that a tabby’s primary responsibility is to provide her territory with its next generation. So if Blackwell could be counted upon to vote his conscience—and history had already proved that he would—he would have to support Malone in most policy changes intended to hurt me and/or Marc.

  Shit. “What’s passed so far?”

  “New Alphas must be approved by a simple majority of the council before they will be officially recognized,” my uncle said, his frown deepening until I thought his face would collapse in on itself.

  That one could be aimed at either me or Marc, and would no doubt apply to Jace, too, if his father had any idea how much of a threat Jace had become. “Wow, they’re planning way ahead. What else passed?”

  My uncle sighed. “All Prides must pay a monthly stipend to a discretionary fund that will be used to finance council business.”

  “What kind of business?” Marc asked, as he drained the first skillet of beef.

  “Establishing a new, permanent council headquarters, hiring new enforcers as needed…”

  Anger burned in the back of my throat, where a growl itched to form. “For which Pride? Malone’s, I assume? We’re supposed to pay for him to hire new thugs? No way in he—”

  “Not for him,” my father interjected, before I could complete the planned profanity. “Enforcers for the council at large, to handle any issue that involves more than one Pride. They’ll be like state troopers, to our city police.”

  “That one’s a direct shot at your dad,” Uncle Rick added. “For handling the Manx issue on his own instead of turning it over to the council.”

  It took real effort to make my pulse stop racing, and to keep my teeth from Shifting out of fury. “Is that it?” If those were the laws that passed with Blackwell’s vote, I could only imagine what kind of horrible proposals he’d actually found objection to.

  “T
hose are the most threatening so far.” Di Carlo ran one hand through hair still thick and dark in his late fifties. “But we’re supposed to debate one more this afternoon….” He glanced at his fellow Alphas, none of whom seemed inclined to complete Di Carlo’s aborted sentence.

  Every hair on my body stood straight up. “What? What’s the new proposal?”

  Finally my father sighed and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking more pessimistic and frustrated than I’d seen him in a very long time. At least when Ethan died, he’d gotten angry. I’d much rather see him angry than discouraged. “Faythe… His new proposal says that no woman can serve as an enforcer until she’s given birth to a daughter.”

  Noooo…

  My uncle took one look at the horror surely clear on my face and rushed to explain. “Originally the policy said that no women should be allowed to serve, period, but Blackwell balked at that, so Malone tacked on the daughter codicil. And it looks like Blackwell’s going to support that one, too.”

  Of course he was. He’d always believed that I was better suited to a diaper bag than a pair of handcuffs.

  “The problem is that there’s no good way to protest that one,” Di Carlo said. “If we want to survive as a species, we do need…” His voice trailed off, but we all knew how that sentence should have ended.

  I’d grown up knowing one great, pervasive truth, and had discovered another since I started working for my father. The first was that in order to survive, the south-central Pride needed me to give them children. Because of a genetic inconvenience, there were usually four to six boys born before each daughter, and like most tabbies, I was the only girl in my family. The vacancy of my womb meant the end of my family tree and extinction for my Pride. There was no way around that.

  The second—equally important—was that I wanted to serve as an enforcer, and some day as an Alpha. I had yet to come up with a compromise between my own personal rock and hard place, and until I did, the council—especially now that Malone was leading it—would use that against me.