Mountainview’s natural beauty was stunning—no one was arguing with that—but it didn’t come with many extras. The packs that had tried to nibble its edges away in the past would have been happy to have the land, but now when Lydia offered it to them, it turned out they didn’t want the responsibility of the people who came with it.
That made sense, but Lydia still had the sense that she was getting the runaround. This wasn’t about someone who was shying away from suddenly becoming an alpha who’d have to scrimp and save for a lot of retirees they’d never even met before. Most wolves never even got the chance to head up a pack, so being an alpha—even under imperfect circumstances—still came with honor and prestige they might never get another chance at.
And even though people these days didn’t usually want to have their mate-bond dictated by sheer political convenience, that probably wasn’t the real problem either. Lydia was nosupermodel, not by a long shot, but she wasn’t hideous, either. So far, everyone she’d approached with this peculiar proposal had met her at least once or twice, and Lydia was pretty sure they’d formed the same impression everyone always did. Lydia Vasquez: practical, easygoing, steady, dogged. Easy to get along with.
Okay, so that description made her sound more like a reliable sedan than the heroine of some grand love affair, but if you were at all willing to enter into a political marriage like this, a reliable sedan was probably exactly what you were hoping for. This mate-bond would be a working partnership, and hopefully a friendly one. It didn’t have to be more than that.
But she still couldn’t get any bites. She got some genuine apologies and some shifty expressions, and that was it.
They were afraid of Reeve.
Werewolf packs weren’t as openly aggressive as they used to be. Turf wars and alpha challenges, however fatal, were still accepted under wolf law—you just needed to keep the whole business away from humans, who were understandably alarmed by it—but again, they were mostly symbolic these days. They were rare, and they were getting even rarer.
People wanted quiet lives, not brutal violence. Lydia felt the same way. But that didn’t change the fact that her pack was vulnerable to a bloodthirsty bully.
Shewas willing to put her life on the line to protect them, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that nobody else felt the same way. Why should they? They didn’t care about the Mountainview pack. They might eventually, but they didn’t want to join it and die for it on the same day.
There were a handful of strong, physically fit guys in her pack, but most of them were already mated. The ones who weren’t all had responsibilities like kids and elderly parents who needed attention. They had quietly made it clear they would dowhatever she needed them to do to help out, but she didn’t like the idea of taking them away from the people who really needed them.
And it still didn’t feel right to draw her mate from inside the pack; her wolf revolted against it, and she understood why. They were in desperate need of fresh faces and fresh blood. She didn’t want to marry people who felt like family.
Lydia let herself collapse for a second, planting her elbows on her knees and resting her head in her hands.
Her grandmother wasn’t the kind to give her a soothing “there, there” on the shoulder.
“You don’t have time to sulk,” she said crisply. “There are still other options.”
“Like what?”
“There are some wolves we haven’t talked to yet. Ones who are ... known to be fighters.”
Lydia lifted her head up so she could give Ruth an incredulous look. “You mean the ones I struck off our initial list of candidates? Those guys are almost as bad as Reeve.”
Was that really what it would come to? Her having to choose the very-slightly-lesser of two evils?
Was her owngrandmotherreally advocating that she marry someone like that?
Of course she is, Lydia realized with a sinking feeling.You know Ruth always puts the pack first. She has to. Like I’ll have to, when I’m really alpha.
It gave her a tiny bit of comfort that Ruth didn’t seem to like this “solution” any more than she did.
“We’re in a tight corner,” Ruth said. “Only a fool would ever have gone to them first. I know the men you ruled out, Lydia. They’re violent, heavy-handed, and, well ....” She made a dismissive, weary hand gesture that Lydia assumed was supposed to cover at least half-a-dozen different varieties ofinterpersonal shittiness. “But you may need to go down that road. Are you willing to?”
“I have to be, don’t I? We’ve already exhausted all our actually good options.”
She could still hear Reeve in her head:Clock’s ticking.
Lydia said, “I’ll call those guys in if I need to. I have to do whatever I can. They’re bad, but Reeve is worse. You know I literally saw him kick a dog once? And it’s not like it bit him. It was just happily playing fetchnearhim, and that was enough. That’s how mean he is.”
Ruth nodded without much interest. She was too worn-out these days to devote much time to anything besides the pack, so a dog she’d never seen didn’t merit a lot of attention.
She gave Lydia a critical once-over, though, and Lydia wondered if this conversation was about to take a particularly bizarre turn. Was her grandmother going to tell her that if she wanted to get a man, she needed to smile more? Wear more makeup? Ditch her usual long-sleeve tees and flannel work-shirts?
But Lydia had forgotten that every now and then, in her own undemonstrative way, Ruth did try to look after her.
“Go out tonight,” Ruth said.
“What?”
