As the first female Alpha in history, Faythe was practically a legend in every shifter society on the planet. She’d shattered the glass ceiling with her notoriously hard head and ripped theno girls allowedsign from the council’s clubhouse. Faythe had paved the way, at least in theory, for every tabby who would come after her.
I, on the other hand, was the only tom in the world ever to have been dumped by a female Alpha, which had left certain members of the Territorial Council less than confident in my ability to lead. In a society where the respect an Alpha commands is crucial to the authority he wields, how weretheysupposed to have any confidence in me whenshe’dfound me lacking?
Not that any of that would matter for long. My sister, Melody, was nineteen. When she married, I would be expected to train her husband so he could take over the territory with her at his side. Matrilineal inheritance had always been the norm so that our few tabbies could stay in their birth Prides, which would be run by the Alphas they chose as husbands.
Faythe had opened up new possibilities for female leadership, but the percentage of tabbies who would naturally develop into Alphas was no greater than the percentage of toms who would, and Melody… Well, my sister couldn’t even pick a bottle of lotion without asking for a second opinion.
Regardless, I was little more than a temporary guardian of my future brother-in-law’s territory.
But that was nothing Abby needed to be reminded of.
“Thetrulyhard part is getting the other Alphas to understand the relevance of electronic communication in modern Pride leadership.” I shrugged and forced a laugh. “You’d think email was synonymous with witchcraft, if you took Paul Blackwell’s word for it.” The old fart still hand-wrote letters to his fellow Alphas on honest-to-goodness carbon paper.
“That’s not what I meant.”
She’d meant that it must have been hard having to talk to Faythe so often after she’d picked Marc over me. Abby, like everyone else, was wondering if I’d gotten over losing the love of my life. Or whether I ever would.
According to the gossip from my own enforcers, the answer was no, and it always would be. But then, according to those clowns, Faythe had only picked Marc because she couldn’t have any of them.
“So, you haven’t seen Faythe in a while?” she asked.
I turned to see that the setting sun had turned her curls into living flames. “Um, it’s been about three years, I guess.”
Three and a half, but who was counting?
“Seriously? But aren’t most council meetings still held at the Lazy S?”
I nodded, and she frowned with the realization that I couldn’t have gone so long without seeing Faythe unless I was consciously avoiding her. And that was true, but it wasn’t just Faythe I was dodging. I was avoiding every memory I’d ever made at the Lazy S, because even the good ones were bittersweet in retrospect.
Especially with Ethan gone.
“About time,” I mumbled as the gate appeared ahead, beneath a familiar capital S lying on its side. “I swear, the drive from the airport gets longer every time.”
Abby groaned, as if she’d suddenly remembered something important. “Slow down!” She dove between our seats headfirst, placing herverywell-shaped and barely covered hindquarters inches from my face.
“What the hell are you doing?” I pressed on the brake as I turned off of the highway, and it took every bit of willpower I could summon not to peek into the rearview mirror for an even more intimate viewing angle of what her skirt didn’t cover. As the vehicle came to a stop, Abby settled back into her seat holding a small square box she’d dug from a bag in the back.
A ring box.
“I almost forgot,” she mumbled, as she pulled her engagement ring out and slid it onto the fourth finger of her left hand. It was a single round diamond mounted high on a slim gold band, and the damn thing caught the dying light like rays from Heaven. I had to squint to see through the reflected glare.
“Why don’t you wear it at school?” I was caught strangely off guard by the rare reminder that she had been spoken for a long time ago. Not that it mattered.
Abby frowned at her hand, which somehow looked completely different with that one simple addition. “Because Brian… It’d be hard to explain to humans.”
Hell, her engagement would be hard to explain even to most shifters, who grow up knowing about the expectations placed upon a tabby at birth.
After narrowly surviving abduction, captivity, and gang rape the summer she was seventeen, Abby’s senior year in high school was very difficult for her. A few weeks in, she’d dropped out in favor of homeschooling with her mother, and shortly after that, she’d gotten her GED. Around April of that year, her parents had sent her to the ranch to spend time with Faythe and Manx, who’d both survived similar trauma—a little less in Faythe’s case, and significantly more in Manx’s.
Faythe taught Abby to fight and talked her into starting college. Manx kept Abby from withdrawing from the world physically and helped her deal with nightmares.
That summer, she also got to know Brian Taylor, Faythe’s newest enforcer at the time. Brian was young, and nice, and interested—I’d known him for years by then—and to everyone’s surprise, Abby didn’t shy away from his reportedly sweet and patient pursuit. By the end of the summer, she’d accepted his ring, to her parents’ delight, on the condition that the wedding be put off until she finished college.
Brian was amenable and that was no surprise. Engagement to Abby meant that he would be trained to take over her birth Pride. He would be an Alpha, a husband, and a father—opportunities rarely available to toms, because of the severe gender imbalance. Though their engagement was preposterously long by shifter standards, Brian was the envy of his peers.
But other than a few summer weeks spent on the ranch, he and Abby had hardly seen each other since she’d started school, and she only wore the ring when she went home. She was clearly no longer the shy freshman who’d joined my Pride, but neither did she act like a young woman eager for her wedding night.
Hell, my sister had subscriptions to three different bridal magazines, even though the face and name of her potential groom changed on a monthly basis, yet I’d never even heard Abby mention the ceremony her mother had been planning for years.
