“Pack code,” Cash rasped, so I turned to look at him. “Grant found a loophole. Because he took the pack from Reeve, he can rechallenge anyone who broke away to get control back.”
“Surely he’d have had to do that years ago for it to be valid,” Prudence suggested.
The wolves in the room, Jax and Maia and now Seth—and I supposed, Cash—didn’t look so secure.
Maia frowned at me, but she didn’t meet my eye, her own huge liquid brown eyes trained on the floor. “Most of the code doesn’t really do time frames.”
“Doesn’t ‘do’ time frames? What the hell does that mean?” I spun around, looking at everyone, since no one was meeting my gaze suddenly, and it wasn’t even because Prudence said there was a ghost attached to me.
Hell, even the asshole himself was staying silent for the moment. Unlike the wolves, though, he looked smug rather than nervous and slightly ashamed.
“Wolves don’t put things off until later,” Jax finally explained, his voice slightly dull with the exhaustion of the situation. “So when we wrote our laws, we did so with the assumption that things would happen right away, but not the explicit order of it.”
“So, what, he can just enact stupid clauses in your laws forever? He can keep coming back to try to take over a pack that doesn’t even know him forever?” I turned to look at each of them again and tried not to laugh hysterically when they looked like puppies who’d just gotten caught going on the floor.
Finally, Seth sighed and looked up at me. “Not forever. Just once. Those numbers are always straightforward and statedclearly. You get one shot at most things. The code only fails in that it doesn’t say when you can take that one shot.”
Well... while that sucked, it didn’t sound so bad. “Is Grant somehow scarier than the previous alpha?”
I looked to Cash, who seemed like the most knowledgeable person on the subject, but his eyes were fluttering shut, and I couldn’t much blame him for being exhausted, since he’d almost fucking died.
So I glanced around the room, and the expressions were telling. Seth was rolling his eyes, and Maia was looking at me like I’d asked the elusive “stupid question.”
“No,” Jax finally answered. “Grant was inferior to Reeve in every way. It never occurred to me he might have taken control of the pack. I... I suppose that’s my fault.”
“Oh please,” Jillian scoffed from the doorway. “No, Dakota. Grant is not that scary. He’s half the man his brother was, and his brother was a raging worthless asshole whose own mate broke their bond and abandoned him to run back to Russia to her family. But he does have some power over the pack who’s agreed to follow him. It’s not that he’s a strong wolf, it’s that there’s actual, literal magic power in wolves submitting to you.”
“And unless something has changed,” Seth said, glancing over at the sleeping Cash, “the Idaho pack has a lot more wolves than we do.”
Now that? I did not understand. “Why didn’t they come with you when you came to San Francisco?”
A stab of something lanced through me, pain and toe-curling awfulness and—Jax’s emotions as processed by my brain were sometimes hard to parse, but this one was not. He was still hurt by the people who hadn’t come after he’d defeated Reeve. Ashamed. By Cash.
I tried not to hold it against the injured man, but that was going to be hard.
“They’re dogs,” my asshole relative ghost burst out when no one answered me. “They belong in the woods, like the wild animals they are. They don’t belong in human civilization.”
I shot him a glare, but Jax didn’t need to deal with the stress of me responding to a bigot he couldn’t even see while also dealing with some douchebag thinking to challenge him for... for what? Money? Control of the pack?
That was some bullshit.
No, Jax didn’t need to deal with my crap on top of his. I would talk to Prudence later about how to scrape a fucking ghost off of me, and for now, I would take care of Jax. So I just shot the guy a glare and turned to Jax, grabbing his hand and tugging him toward the door.
“Change is scary,” he said as he followed me out. “They were nervous. And abandoning everything you’ve ever known for no promise of better is overwhelming.”
Ahh. They had been scared, and he was trying not to call them cowards, which was a loaded issue in werewolf circles. I thought fear was justified, almost always. Werewolves? They’re less forgiving about that.
“We’re going upstairs to have sex,” I announced to the house at large. “So if you don’t want to hear that, you might want to clear out.” My cheeks flushed as I said it, but I was starting to get the hang of some werewolf stuff.
None of them were ashamed that I was going to fuck Jax, so why should I be ashamed of it?
When I got to the stairs and turned back to look at him, he was beaming at me.
So yeah.
Still in the ground floor bedroom, Seth snorted. “Like we haven’t all heard you two having sex by now.”
Somewhere behind me, the asshole ghost muttered something about the dogs hanging around to listen to us fucking,but it didn’t bother me at all that no one left. We were family, and they weren’t staying to listen. They just didn’t mind that Jax and I loved each other, and nothing was going to change that.
