My brothers would scoff at me and ask me who the fuck I thought I was talking to—of coursethey got their shit done. These young males are a little more in awe of their king’s chosen mate. When they finish falling all over themselves to assure me that theywalkedtheir deliveries through a troll-infested blizzardboth waysand would welcome the opportunity to do it again, I let them go.
Then I walk into the office and start sorting through more than a week’s worth of paperwork, filing away the notes and receipts that the drivers and riders leave for me. Plus the various forms of payment that come in and are stacked in the warehouse until the pack can allocatethem where needed, or need to be recorded and written out so the higher-level members of the pack know who owes us a debt.
It feels even more important now, after the solstice and Ty’s new role, to not only keep my records pristine but to make sure that the pattern recognition that Ty bragged about in church that day remains so on point that it almost feels predictive—
Hard to do if I missed someone systematically sabotaging us, though.
Reallyhard to do if all the great things Ty said to all those men about me were bullshit because I missed the most crucial part of it all.
No one’s here in this warehouse now. No one can see me when I stop what I’m doing, sink down to the cold floor, and put my head in my hands. Then breathe a little heavily as the emotions I’ve been keeping at arm’s length for days come for me. Hard.
Feelingsplus the idea of a traitor sit on me like a boot on my throat. What’s ending. What’s beginning. What we won on the solstice but all the things we’ve lost, too.
It makes me think for a moment that it might be my time to cry after all.
But I don’t. I breathe my way through it, raggedly. Loudly.
I slowly get my shit together, here in this warehouse where I carved out my independence when I first came home from school. Traitor or no traitor, sabotage or not, I know my time here in this office is coming to an end. Or it will change like everything else, anyway, because everything all around me is different now. And will get even more different once I’m fully claimed.
This isn’t a someday thing anymore.
It’ssoon. It’s pretty much right now.
I knew when my brothers fetched me home from New York after the Reveal that I needed to have a good reason not to mate with Ty immediately. Vibes and my feelings wouldn’t cut it.
I picked the one thing no one could argue too much about—pack business. The thing that made our pack more solid than all the othersand better off than most of the other Kind in this valley. I threw myself into an aspect of the business that no one else had touched and made myself indispensable.
I organized everything in this office, created systems to keep things running smoothly, and started tracking everything we did.
It means,I explained to an unreadable Ty a few months after I came back from New York,that you can expand without worrying about whether or not you’re losing that personal touch. It means there’s no limit to what you can do.
You think I want to expand? Our territory is our territory, babe.
Right now it is.I didn’t back down.But look how the world’s changed already. Who knows what it will look like in a year. Three years. Ten years.
He’d let me keep going, even though I was sure he knew that because this kind of thing wasn’t something queens did, what he was doing was giving me another excuse not to run with him beneath the full moon.
Maybe he did it because he believed in me. Maybe he did it because he liked the idea of keeping his hand on what was happening all over the territory. Maybe he always saw himself getting bigger than the territory he’d won all those years ago.
Either way, he’s let me do this for three years. Now we’re going to do the other, bigger thing. It’s neither good nor bad.
But it’s different.
My college graduation felt a lot like this. I didn’t need anyone to come and celebrate an accomplishment most of my pack didn’t consider worth my time in the first place. Graduation was for me—but that was the trouble. It was the last thing that was mine.
I knew as it was happening that it was very unlikely I would have anything else that was all mine like college had been.
Taking off my cap and gown felt like stripping off my skin. When I felt that same shift all around me, the way every last monster across the world did that night, at first I wondered if I was imagining it. If I was transmitting my feelings, somehow.
It took longer than it should have for me to understand that the confusion and chaos was widespread and not personal at all.
I wondered, as I hunkered down in the apartment my friends never returned to, if it was possible I was as self-centered as everyone in my pack always told me I was. Imagining that something so catastrophic was aboutme.
Peak Maddox,I was sure they would say—if I ever saw them again.
That first night, I didn’t think I would. Some of the Kind danced in the streets. There was celebrating everywhere. The type of celebrations that came with the crunching of bones and the screams of the innocent.
The wolf in me approved, but the human college student I’d been playing for four years cried. A lot.
