“Yep.”
“You could just be Rogue.”
“I am Rogue.”
She sputtered the beer she was sipping and coughed a few times. “What?”
“I’m Rogue. My whole Pack is.”
That did not make any sense. “You can’t be Rogue and have a Pack.”
“You said you looked up my registration, right? That’s where you found out my name? You saw the pictures of the local werewolves on your phone inside that restaurant, and you figured out who I was, same as a dozen people a day do.”
“Yes,” she admitted softly.
“And what did my registration say?”
“Unpaired. It said your age, height, weight, last known address, and the color of your wolf.”
“No Pack name though. My Pack name was taken off my registration. That’s a new thing. My Alpha paired with a human and the Elder’s lost it. We are being punished.”
“Fuck the Elders,” she ground out. Her ears were instantly hot just thinking about them.
Dodger cocked his head. “Do they mess with your stepdad?”
“Every few months. It’s just long-term bullying.”
“Why do they care about him?”
“Because he was an Alpha, and he dropped the Pack when the Elders found out. His Pack didn’t have his back, and wouldn’t accept my mom, so he left.”
“Oh shit,” Dodger said, sounding impressed.
She pursed her lips. “He left his Pack with both middle fingers up. He was loud when he left too. I don’t know all the stories, but my mom said it was terrifying. It was her first time seeing what he could do. First time seeing his wolf fight, and all that.”
“What Pack did he leave?”
“Jordan Haul Pack.”
Dodger lifted his chin higher into the air. “Michigan? When did you move here?”
“When I was three, right after he left his Pack.”
“And he never wanted to start a new one?”
She shrugged. “There was a Pack around here. The Coeur d’Alene Lake Pack, but he didn’t like how they ran things. They were human haters too, so what was he going to do? Take over a Pack that would reject my mom and me? We are his world. He is protective. Like…reallyprotective of us. He didn’t want to set us up for rejection again. The Elders did approach him last month about maybe taking over the territory on the government land but told him he would have to move us away from the territory and cut ties with me and my mom.”
Dodger huffed a laugh. “We just vacated that land.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “You were Coeur d’Alene Lake Pack?”
He nodded. “The Elders stripped our homes and territory from us. We are still around though. We just can’t officially be in a Pack again. We can never register as one.”
“How…” she frowned, trying to think of a polite way of asking him this. “How are you still around? They’re filling that territory with new members, you know?”
“My Alpha’s human mate bought us land.”
“Oooh,” Destiny punched out through a slow laugh. “You’re giving the Elders the middle finger too.”
