Maybe—
“He left!”
For the first time in her life, Lydia actually felt her jaw drop.
I wouldn’t have thought of that one. Not in a million years.
She wasn’t alone in thinking it had to be too good to be true, because Case was also blinking in stunned surprise.
“Heleft?” Case said. “How do you know? Where did he go?”
Wendy was too excited to tell the story in a straight line, but Lydia put it together as she went:
Wendy had a friend, an antelope shifter, who worked at the nearest airport. The friend, Wendy assured them, was usually scrupulously ethical when it came to privacy concerns, but she knew that Wendy’s pack was having a really tough time with a troublemaker named Reeve Steele. (“And his name stuck in her head, because, you know, his name is Reeve Steele,” Wendy said. “I’m ninety percent sure he must have changed it. Nobody’s born with a name like that. There are notoddlersnamed Reeve Steele.”)
So when Reeve showed up at the airport, Wendy’s friend remembered him. But what had really raised her eyebrows and made her give Wendy a call was the fact that Reeve hadn’t just caught his flight today, he’dbought his tickettoday. Airport employees tended to notice that kind of thing.
Reeve was on the move. He wanted to get far away—all the way to Florida, according to Wendy’s friend—and he wanted to get there fast.
He must have wanted it pretty badly. Most wolves—lifelong wolves, she amended, thinking of Case, who thankfully wouldn’t have to deal with this problem—didn’t fly unless they absolutely had to. Their animal instincts usually wanted to keep them on the ground. People who were turned later in life usually had the memories of previous successful flights to convince their inner animals that it was fine, but it was a fear natural werewolves had to actually work to overcome.
Reeve didn’t strike Lydia as a guy who had done a lot of work grappling with his own problems, so if he’d taken to the skies, he must have been pretty desperate.
“This is a long shot,” Case said, “but did he happen to tell your friend why he was leaving?”
Wendy shook her head with an obvious pang of regret, but then she immediately brightened. “But isn’t it obvious? He’s intimidated by you! The plan worked! Reeve’s not prepared to fight two people, so now he’s on the run!”
That was what Lydia wanted to believe, of course. It wasn’t even implausible. Reeve had clearly been shocked and appalled that Lydia would dare “cheat” by enlisting Case as backup. Besides, in their brief showdown on the porch, Case hadn’t had any trouble knocking Reeve away from her. Sure, Reeve hadn’t expected any interference at all, but there were plenty of wolves he could have thrown aside without batting an eye. Case obviously wasn’t one of them. Now Reeve knew that. And he definitely struck Lydia as the kind of guy who preferred to only take on people who were weaker than he was.
Did that mean that he’d run away with his tail between his legs? She wasn’t sure, but she couldn’t think of any other explanation.
“It makes sense,” she said slowly. “Wolf packs talk to each other, but usually only if they’re close. I don’t know any packs on the other side of the country. So I couldn’t warn anyone there about Reeve.”
She was pretty sure he was from Alabama, though, so he might have passed through Florida before. Maybe that had beenenoughof a warning for any packs around there, and they’d know to keep their distance. She hoped so.
Wendy nodded. “New territory. He’ll have fresh pickings, and he won’t have to face up to any rumors about running away from a fight.”
“And if he wanted to save face,” Case said, “I’m guessing he’d have to get out of town before ....”
Before Ruth dies. Lydia could understand why he didn’t want to say it, especially around her, but unfortunately, she had a lot of practice thinking about it. It was inevitable, and Ruth had never let her shy away from inevitabilities, especially ones she had to prepare for in order to protect the pack.
And he was right. All of Mountainview had known, for months now, that Reeve was waiting in the wings. He would want to avoid the maximum humiliation of them actuallyseeinghim not challenge her and Case.
So he’d gone off to get a fresh start somewhere else.
This could be over. She was finally starting to believe it. Weeks and weeks of tension left her body, and the heavy weight of dread shifted off her shoulders.
... And underneath it all was a flicker of jealousy.
Why doesReeveget to get away, and I don’t? Why can’t Case and I catch a flight and get out of here?
What was she thinking? She hadn’t even taken on an alpha’s full responsibilities yet, and she was already daydreaming about abandoning her pack? What was wrong with her? Mountainview deserved better than that. Didn’t shewantto be here? Didn’t she care?
She was a little afraid of what answers she might find if she really asked herself these questions—let alone what ones she’d get if she asked her wolf, which would freely express all the selfishness she might try to keep hidden.
The only possible option was to bury all of it as deeply as possible. What she would want her life to be in an ideal world didn’t matter. In the world she actually lived in, she’d gotten great news. Reeve was gone.
Even thinking that helped banish that strange, momentary flicker of envy, and she could follow it up with something even better.
