I turned my face into his palm and kissed his skin. “This is my mess. I didn’t kill Reeve. I left the old pack open to infighting and trouble. I paved the way for Grant, and I didn’t check in foryears. Not because I couldn’t. Not because I didn’t have the resources. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to see if I’d fucked things up back there. It was easier to pretend everything was fine?—”
Right up until I found Cash half dead in a motel room.
“I need to fix it,” I whispered. “And I need you to be safe.”
Dakota frowned. His brow pinched.
In every way that mattered, he was stronger than me, but I wasn’t going to fall apart while he cleaned up my messes.
“I will not let Grant challenge you, Dakota. It’s not happening.”
Dakota sighed, slumping into me again, and though he didn’t agree aloud?—
Well, one way or another, we’d sort this out together. But it wasn’t going to end up with my mate locked in a death match with a fratricidal lunatic.
Not a chance.
16
Dakota
“I’m taking this,” Prudence told me as she walked into my office carrying a huge gift basket.
I lifted a brow at her.
“Not the whole thing, just the champagne. Your dear alpha asked me to look into whether he could accept a gift from the high fae without there being strings attached. The only string is that I’m taking the champagne.”
I shrugged and waved at it, because I couldn’t have cared less about anything in a gift basket. It would have been much more stressful if it had turned out we had to send it back and tell them no. The high fae were a prickly lot, and turning down gifts, even ones that came with strings attached, was a questionable choice. “Take the whole thing if you want. We just needed to be sure there were no issues.”
She grabbed the bottle in the center of the basket by the neck and came to sit in the chair across from me. “I don’t really do that much aged cheese these days. My doctor doesn’t like me eating such fatty foods. So eat them now while you can!” She paused, looking at me for a moment. “Though I suppose, being a wolf, that won’t be the same for you.”
I had no rightful idea what older wolves could and couldn’t eat—the pack was strictly made up of wolves in a specific age range, since they’d all been late teenagers when they broke away from the Idaho pack, and hadn’t picked up a lot of new members along the way.
In fact, I was the youngest member of my pack by close to a decade, and no one was older than Jax, so it was a less than fifteen-year spread even with my inclusion.
“Now, what was it you wanted to see me about?” Prudence asked, just as Seth joined us, closing the door behind him. She turned to look at the staid security man, black T-shirt stretched tight across his enormous muscular chest, looking mildly surprised to see him.
I supposed Seth wasn’t the person she usually worked with even when she wasn’t there to see me.
“Jax is freaking out,” I explained, keeping my tone low, but not whispering, trying not to get too much attention from anyone not in my office. The rooms were soundproofed, but we were werewolves, so that wasn’t always a perfect answer to privacy. “Apparently Grant intends to challenge me, not him, and I need a fix for this. I asked you two to join me because I thought you were most likely to help me come up with an answer.”
The look that crossed Seth’s face, sheer disgust, as he dropped into the chair next to Prudence’s, gave me a moment’s concern. I shouldn’t have worried, though. “Seriously? That old bit of bullshit? It’s the excuse a lot of old misogynistic assholes in charge of packs used for years to avoid accepting their mates as equals.” He scrunched up his face and affected an even deeper voice than his already near-baritone. “They’d be challenged for control of the pack if they’re equals.”
Lovely. Why was I at all surprised that misogyny came into it? Sometimes it seemed to run all human and supernatural society.
Prudence didn’t look any happier. “And you can’t use magic if he does challenge you.”
Seth looked surprised at that, cocking his head in her direction. “Seriously? That doesn’t make any sense. He’s a mage. Why wouldn’t he use anything at his disposal?”
“There was a situation a few hundred years ago, where a wolf alpha took a mage for a mate, and started having his mate challenge all his rivals for control of their packs. He was trying to consolidate every pack in Europe under his rule, like he was a king rather than a pack leader. It was ingenious, if horrible.” She looked at least as disgusted as Seth at the notion, and I... well, I couldn’t say much, since I’d initially been thinking I’d just set Grant on fire or something.
“So they changed pack law to stop him,” Seth said, sighing and rolling his eyes. “There’s always some asshole they’ve got to rewrite the rules for.”
Prudence nodded, setting the champagne bottle down next to herself and crossing her legs. “I suspect that shortly, ‘that asshole’ is going to be Grant. Especially if he succeeds here. Taking over the Crescent pack would make him the richest werewolf in the world, and I don’t want to imagine what he’d do with that.”
Seth shuddered, and it seemed more like a real gesture than the theatrical one it was when most people did it.
He would know how bad it would be firsthand, after all. He knew Grant. “No one wants that. But Jax has a way around that part, at least. If he loses control of the pack, legally, he loses control of the company. And we’ve got contingencies. If Jax loses control of the company, it immediately gets split between a handful of non-wolf employees who wouldn’t be answerable towolf laws. Our IT guy, Landon Smith, who’s a cat shifter. Jax’s driver and bodyguard, Charles, a low fae. The head of Research and Development, a coyote. You, Ms. McCallan. We haven’t made it public because we don’t want anyone to panic, but Jax wasn’t leaving the company’s future to chance. I think right now he’s trying to talk Jillian into renouncing the pack so that if the worst happens, she won’t have anything to do with it.”
