Reeve’s scowl said he hadn’t missed that.
“Ruth’s not buried yet,” he said harshly. “We hereby challenge you for control of the Mountainview pack.” He elbowed Meg, needing her to second him.
She looked down at her feet. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she muttered to her scuffed-up shoes. “But yes. We challenge you.”
It wasn’t like Lydia had really believed that Meg would back down at the last minute. No one mated with Reeve Steele and came all the way across the country to not do what they’d come for.
Still, she found herself reaching for Case’s hand. She needed him to bolster her—
No, Lydia realized. She didn’t exactly need it. Shecouldhave stood here alone and dealt with it, the way she’d stood alone and dealt with things her whole life. But shewantedto hold his hand while someone was challenging her to a fight to the death, and dammit, she was going to do it. She didn’t care how much it made Reeve sneer.
Case squeezed her hand, and when he looked at her, she gave him a small nod. He could take the next part of this whole idiotic, stupidly necessary exchange.
“Okay,” Case said evenly. “When do you want to do this?”
Reeve almost spat his answer at them: “Now.”
“Oh, now’s not good for us,” Case said, with all his blithe “I was a human a couple weeks ago” insouciance that he had to know would drive Reeve nuts. Lydia actually had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. “We have a funeral to go to in the morning.”
“I don’t care if it’s—” Reeve scowled. “Youknowit doesn’t matter if you’re busy right now or not. Lydia had to have told you that.”
Case shrugged.
Reeve’s scowl only deepened, but Meg’s reaction, Lydia thought, was interesting—she looked back and forth between her mate and the stranger she was about to fight with curiosity as well as confusion.
“I’m saying that I only think it’s right for Lydia to get to attend her grandmother’s funeral, and that she shouldn’t be blocked by an asshole like you showing up.”
Reeve’s scowl changed back to a sneer. Lydia wondered if he even knew how to smile at all. If he ever had, he’d probably trained himself out of it because it didn’t fit the tough image he was going for.
“Maybe if you die, and she surrenders, she can attendtwofunerals tomorrow.”
He clearly thought it was a good line, but Case was fantastically, adorably unruffled by it.
“I don’t think they’d get me in the ground that fast, actually. And anyway, Lydia isn’t the type to surrender, especially not to you.”
Reeve didn’t like the way they kept foiling him and ignoring his oh-so-clever taunts. They hadn’t even acknowledged that he’d outwitted them by showing up with Meg, which he obviously thought was rude.
“Now,” he said again. “You know you don’t get a choice. The challenge has come, and you have to meet it or lose your pack.”
That was blunt enough, and true enough, that there was nothing they could retort this time. A chill ran down Lydia’s spine. This time, unfortunately, Reeve was right. Lydia had spent months trying to think of a way around this, or a way tosurvive it, and now it was here and she didn’t know what the odds were at all.
But to her surprise, it didn’t matter. Despite that single cold shudder, she was mostly warm. Dying today would be so much better than dying a month ago would have been. She’d gotten to fall in love with her true mate. They’d eaten linzer cookies and made love and slept beside each other night after night.
She’d gotten to know her pack as a true alpha, not just an alpha’s heir, and she’d gotten to know it without Ruth’s shadow hanging over her. She had at least gotten to hear what Case thought the pack could be, even if she hadn’t had the time or courage to try it out. Now she wished she had, because her objections seemed so small and far away. Right now, the world was crystal clear to her.
She raised her chin—and her voice. Mountainview was gathering around the porch yet again, everyone’s eyes wide with fear and anticipation. She wanted them to hear what she had to say.
“We’ll fight you for the pack. But even if you win, don’t think for a second that they’ll just let you waltz in here and take over. This town is braver than you ever could be, and they’re not going to surrender just because you killed us. They’ll make it hard for you, Reeve. They might even make it impossible.”
Reeve rolled his eyes. “Packs always follow their alphas. They don’t have a choice. What are they going to do, challenge me? None of them are up for it.”
“They don’t need to challenge you to make your life hell.” She remembered what Polly had said. “Or to leave Mountainview. What are you going to do to make them stay?”
“They have to stay,” Reeve growled. “That’show it works.”
Suddenly, Lydia could see that she and Reeve actually had had something in common this whole time, and she didn’t like it. They’d both taken it for granted that packs worked a certainway, and there was no changing that. Packs followed. Alphas led. Reeve didn’t think packs could ever stand up for themselves, and Lydia didn’t think—hadn’tthought—that alphas could ever lie down, no matter how much they needed to.
Reeve would have been a much worse alpha than Ruth—acatastrophicalpha—but they would have still been working out of the same playbook about what alphas did and how they functioned. Up until now, Lydia had been doing the same thing. It was time to see if that couldn’t change.
