Tom barked out a heavy laugh and waved off the words. “You’d rip out my throat before I even got halfway through my shift. I’ll leave it to others to try.”
“Some friend you are,” Patrick said.
Tom scowled at him. “Shut it, arsehole.”
“Yeah, not happening.”
“Pat,” Jono said, glancing over at him. “Don’t hurt him, yeah?”
Patrick rolled his eyes. “I’ll leave him alive so long as he doesn’t try to kill you.”
“What the fuck do you think you could do to me?” Tom snapped.
Patrick stared at Tom without fear in his eyes and smiled mockingly. “Nothing you’d remember because you’d be in a grave.”
“Tom,” Jono said sharply, the tone in his voice stopping Tom halfway out of his seat. “He’s my pack. They all are.”
Tom sat with a heavy thump, staring at Jono with a gobsmacked look on his face. “They’re yourwhat?”
“We’re the New York City god pack, which is why we need to speak to the London god pack about pass-through rights. Entering their personal territory isn’t something we can do without permission. Can you give us a contact number or name? I’m Jono’s dire, and I’ll be initiating outreach,” Sage said calmly.
Tom outright laughed, his casual dismissiveness making Jono grind his teeth. He hadn’t minded Tom’s attitude when he was younger, but Jono didn’t much care for it today. “You made a god pack with mundane humans? What the fuck kind of joke is this, Jono?”
“It’s not,” Jono stated flatly. “We’re here on pack business.”
Tom’s mirth faded in seconds, and he stared Jono in the eye. “You really got a pack?”
Jono nodded slowly. “It’s why I left.”
“Agodpack though?”
“It’s the only sort I can make with these eyes of mine.”
“You don’t have any other werecreatures with you. That’s not a pack.”
Jono figured Patrick’s shields and Sage’s fae pendant were doing their job if Tom’s nose hadn’t picked out what they really were. Wade was still at the bar eating, no one paying him any mind, but he appeared human to Jono’s senses.
“Pack is what you make of it, and I made mine.”
This time the silence lasted longer, and Jono waited Tom out with a patience he hadn’t had when he was younger. Eventually, Tom blew out a heavy breath and leaned forward. “It’s a shit time for you to return, bruv. Things are a mess, and your exile still stands, even with Jessamine gone.”
“I’d heard. What happened?”
Tom shrugged. “She got challenged and lost.”
He said it with a finality that could only mean Jessamine’s body was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere on the land the god pack owned outside of London proper. It’s where the challenge ring had moved some generations back, between two world wars. The god pack still held territory in the city, but the ancestral grounds had expanded in a bid for privacy they didn’t always get from the government and the London streets saturated with CCTV.
“And Finley?”
“Still alpha. Cressida co-leads with him, but she’s…not someone you want to cross. You go before them and they might kill you for knocking on their door.”
Jono shared a look with Sage, who immediately pulled out her mobile and accessed a saved article that came with a face and name in less than a minute.
“Cressida Moore. Gained the alpha rank three years ago,” Sage said.
Patrick extended his arm at her. “Let me see.”
Jono passed the mobile over so Patrick could review the article. Jono would take a look at it later. Tom watched the interplay with a curious look in his eyes.
