Still alive.
As long as Jax was still alive . . .
“Everyone calm the fuck down,” Jillian snapped.
Of course Jillian was the one to take charge.
“Seth, take that down to the lab and have them find out what the fuck it is. They should be able to do that. Maia, send out an email, tell everyone in the building to check their coffee for anything that shouldn’t be in it, but without raising a panic. Lydia, take Kent down to the nurse, see if there’s anything she can do.” There was a pause as people started to move, to follow Jillian’s commands. Thank goodness for Jillian. Then her voiceturned soft. “Dakota, honey? I know it’s hard. But if you can’t do it, then I’ll call Prudence. What do you think?”
Wordlessly, I reached into my pocket and grabbed my phone, shoving it in her direction.
Beneath my fingers, Jax’s pulse skipped a beat, and I held my breath.
When it continued, so did I.
23
Jax
Ihadn’t realized how familiar Grant’s sneer was until I saw it in my dreams.
Not on his face, but on Reeve’s. Sharp and toothy and arrogant.
But there was some unease, some fear in Grant that wasn’t present in his brother.
Reeve had been larger. That was part of it, surely.
But I thought it had more to do with the way Reeve carried himself. He was the son of the last alpha, and when his father had gotten too old to defend his claim to leadership, he’d had the good sense to slip into the background of pack management.
Jill and I couldn’t have been more than five when Reeve took over, but I didn’t remember any official announcement or declaration that Reeve would be alpha in his father’s stead.
Perhaps, if his father hadn’t made way, there would have been conflict. There were laws for it, ways to challenge failing pack leadership or edicts that we disagreed with.
The stakes had to be pretty high for a wolf to risk it, but for Jillian’s future? I’d risk anything. It didn’t matter how many people were standing behind Reeve, empowering him as ouralpha. I’d always had her, and she was more than enough for me to see this through.
Reeve wasn’t going to let her go without a fight, and if those were the conditions I had to meet, so be it. I wasn’t leaving without her.
“It’s fine,” Jillian whispered, even once we were back in the safety of the cabin we shared. It’d been our parents’, before they died, but it was down to us to keep it up now. “You should go. I’ll be fine here, and you’ll get to—” Her forced smile wavered.
My stomach clenched. I’d get to do everything that she’d dreamed about, everything she’d been working toward, everything she’d inspired me to reach for, because I knew for damn sure I wouldn’t have done it on my own.
I’d have slid right up Reeve’s backside like a good wolf and, sure, maybe I would’ve done my best to keep the people I loved safe, but I wouldn’t have changed anything. I definitely wouldn’t have fought for this if Jillian didn’t want it too. If she hadn’t been there to show me the value in all this work and education and effort?—
“Absolutely fucking not,” I growled, reaching over to clutch her hands in mine so hard her knuckles pressed together. “I am not going anywhere without you, and you arenotmissing out on college. You worked too fucking hard for too fucking long.”
Jill grimaced. “Jax?—”
I shook my head hard. “I’m going to take care of it, okay? You just make sure your bag is packed. I’ll—I’ll take care of it.”
I did try to talk to Reeve first.
It hadn’t gone well. All the good that I said Jill could do for the pack once she got her education, Reeve was convinced that I could offer on my own. It didn’t matter to him that my drive only came from keeping up with her, that she was the better of the pair of us.
A bitch, he said, was good for one purpose, and the last thing he was going to do was let my sister walk her tight little ass out of our pack for good.
It’d been hard not to kill him then—or at least try—but that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want Reeve dead. I wanted us to go and make the life Jill imagined. If that meant never seeing another wolf again, so be it. I’d have her, and that’d be enough for me.
But I had friends, and I owed them some explanation before I threw it all to the wind and hoped for the best.
