Alpha (8 page)

Jace's fists clenched at his sides, but he kept his mouth shut. I didn't have that much self-control.

“If you ever come near me with a knife again, I
will
kill you.” My voice was calm, and clear, and soft, revealing none of my hidden panic at the memory of Dean wielding a blade, yet all of my cold determination to see him dead. I was kind of impressed, and so was Marc. I could tell because he relaxed a bit beneath my grip.

Dean's eyes narrowed. “The rules are changing, and you're in for a very rude awakening, little puss. I hope you do resist. I hope you have to be broken like a wild horse. And by the time I'm done with you, you're going to wish I'd slit your throat, instead of your cheek.” He glanced at the window over our heads, smiled coldly, and turned to walk off toward his own cabin, as if he hadn't a fear in the world.

“If I accomplish nothing else in my life, I
will
see that bastard bleed out,” Marc breathed.

“He's mine,” I insisted, as Jace fell in at my side to watch Dean go.

The front door opened on my left, and my father emerged, followed by Di Carlo and his enforcers. “What happened?”

“Just a little fraternizing with the enemy,” Jace said. “Nothing we can't handle.”

“Dean's trying to bait us into a fight.” I tucked my arm into my father's. At least I could accept his comfort without pissing anyone off or making anyone jealous. “What's up with Malone?” After the official vote, the Alphas had kicked the enforcers out so the new chair could meet with his council for the first time ever. “Is he already plotting to take over the world?”

“One Pride at a time.” My father sighed as we turned toward our cabin, the path lit only by cold, white moonlight. “He came prepared with a list of ideas to ‘restructure' things.”

“Steal from the poor to feed the rich?” Marc asked from my right, and I could practically taste Jace's frustration at having lost a place at my side.

“Something like that.” My dad rubbed his forehead with his free hand and lowered his voice. “If his new proposals pass, this is going to get unpleasant very quickly.”

“We were just thinking the same thing.” I glanced from Marc to Jace, and they both nodded for me to continue. “We think it's time to call in the reserves. If we leave first thing in the morning, we can be in New Mexico by tomorrow night.”

My father stopped and faced us, and Di Carlo and his enforcers fanned out around us all. “You think we should strike here? On the mountain?”

I shrugged, trying to look more confident than I felt. “It's neutral territory, so Malone doesn't have home field advantage. And if you call in our men while we're gone, they could be here by the time we get back with the birds, which means we'll have Malone vastly outnumbered. It could all be over relatively quickly and easily.”
Assuming he didn't catch wind of what we were doing and bring more of his own men.

My father considered for a moment, then looked to Di Carlo for an opinion. “We've never fought on a large scale in neutral territory.” So far, war had always come in the form of a territorial invasion. “If this maneuver didn't occur to us, it probably won't occur to him.”

I nodded, eagerness creeping up from my toes to tingle in the rest of my body. “And if we don't make a move soon, we're going to lose the opportunity. Malone'll do everything possible to handicap us, starting with exiling Marc.” One of our very best fighters. “Again.” Or worse.

Di Carlo frowned. “I agree, but are we really ready to go to war this soon?”

“We've been ready,” Jace said. “We just need to call in a little favor and get the rest of our men in place.” Only a few enforcers apiece had accompanied the Alphas to the cabin complex.

“I don't see that we have any choice,” my father said. “Calvin's already talking about supplementing the council chair's budget, for operating costs. I have no doubt he'll spend that money hiring more enforcers. Add his allies' troops to that, and our chances of a victory decrease with every day that we give them to prepare.”

Di Carlo finally nodded. “But we need to make sure Aaron and Rick are on board before you three head for New Mexico. Unfortunately, we won't have time to discuss it all tonight. We reconvene in fifteen minutes.”

“How about over lunch tomorrow, in our cabin?” my father asked.

Di Carlo thought for a moment, then nodded again.
“I'll pass it along, and hopefully you three can leave that afternoon.”

My father glanced from me to Marc, then to Jace. “I'll fly Vic and Brian out to replace you.”

I couldn't resist a smile. It was finally happening. Malone was going to pay, and a mere pound of flesh would not suffice. Justice demanded all one hundred eighty pounds of him, laid out cold and dead for the earth to reclaim.

“I
'd call him crazy, if he weren't so well organized.” My uncle Rick Wade leaned back in the ratty armchair, his furrowed forehead reflecting the disappointment on every other face in the room. Including my own, no doubt. “Malone knew he was going to win, and he came prepared. Some of his proposals are obviously dictatorial, but they've been phrased very carefully, so they're hard to reasonably object to.”

“Yeah, he's good at maintaining the illusion of integrity. It's like an evil superpower.” I flipped up the chipped, stainless-steel lever on the kitchen faucet, and water poured into the huge pot. It would take forever to boil on the outdated electric stove, but spaghetti was the easiest meal we knew how to cook in large quantities, and we had extra mouths to feed—my uncle and Aaron Taylor, plus Vic and Brian, who had flown in that morning to replace me, Jace, and Marc, under the assumption we'd be leaving soon for New Mexico.

At the stove, Marc stirred two skillets of ground beef. He was stiff and still irritated because I'd spent the night
on the couch, rather than sleep between him and Jace, or try to convince one of them to take the couch.

Jace looked up from the slices of French bread he was buttering and gave me a small smile. At the moment, anything that pissed Marc off made him happy—Jace was still mad about me wearing
eau de Marc
the night before.

“And you don't think recruiting testimony from the thunderbirds would do any good?” my uncle asked, looking less than convinced.

“I think we've moved beyond political solutions, Rick,” my father said from the chair opposite his brother-in-law. “We always knew it would come to this.”

“And it's about damn time,” Umberto Di Carlo rumbled from somewhere beyond my line of sight. “I was tired of playing nice, anyway. Everyone knows Cal ordered the maneuver that got Ethan killed and
we
know he's responsible for the thunderbird attack that killed Charley Eames and Jake Taylor—”

Aaron Taylor blinked at the mention of his dead son, and I looked away from his pain, because it resurrected my own.

“—and almost cost us Kaci,” Di Carlo continued. And that was without even mentioning the strays he'd had tagged and/or murdered in the free zone, which had almost gotten Marc killed. “It's time he pays for all of that. I say let's quit dragging our feet and make it a real consequence. One he can't live with.”

“I couldn't agree more.” My father's comment was so soft I almost missed it, and when I glanced up, I saw him staring at the coffee table, his hands templed beneath his chin. He was eager for justice, but no Alpha
in his right mind would ask for war without considering the consequences. The possible losses.

“I want to see him pay for Jake's death. But before we jump into anything, I need to know that we're all on the same page,” Aaron Taylor said, as I turned off the water and hauled the half-filled pot out of the sink. “We're talking about
war
. About attacking another Alpha and his allies…”

“We're talking about killing Calvin Malone.” I left the pot on the counter and crossed the kitchen to the doorway, where I could see the whole room. The Alphas had grouped around the coffee table, and Di Carlo's enforcers lined the far wall. “We're talking about removing him from power by removing him from
life
. That's what he deserves, and that's the only permanent solution to the growing problem he represents.”

Taylor leaned forward in his chair, eyeing first me, then his fellow Alphas. “Yes, but full-scale war? If Jake's death has taught me anything, it's that we can't afford to lose that many toms.”

“Neither can we afford to leave Malone in charge,” my father pointed out in his quiet, reasonable tone. “The loss of both lives and liberty would be devastating.”

“Yes, but why not target only Malone?” my uncle asked from the couch.

I picked up an open box of spaghetti from the counter. “We could do it that way, and personally I'd love to be there when Malone takes his last breath. But that's only postponing the inevitable. What do you think the Appalachian Pride and its allies will do if we assassinate their leader? What would
we
do, if they killed one of
you?
”

Uncle Rick sighed. “Full-scale war. But we can't turn back from that, once it starts.”

“Of course not.” My father dropped his hands and sat straighter, drawing all attention his way while I set the pot on the stove and turned the burner on high. “That's the point. The direction the council is headed is unacceptable, and it's going to take something drastic to set it straight again.”

“I agree.” Uncle Rick's shoulders slumped beneath the burden of responsibility they must all have been feeling. “All I'm saying is that, after this, it'll never be the same. The council may never be truly united again.”

“It hasn't been for quite some time,” Di Carlo pointed out. “And our failure to act won't change that. If we start a war to get rid of Malone, we may destroy the council in the process. But if we let things continue, he'll restructure the council to suit his own needs, effectively destroying it himself.”

“He's already started that,” Taylor interjected, and his heavy gaze landed on me with particular weight.

“Whoa, what does that mean?” I glanced at the pot of water, then decided that food could wait. The council had met until late the night before and reconvened early in the morning, without enforcers once again. Evidently the rest of us had missed more than just the design of Malone's new stationery.

My father took his glasses off to polish the lenses, and only once he had them back in place did he meet my gaze. “Calvin had an entire list of policy changes ready to go before the vote, and since then, he's been introducing one after another. So far, about a third of them have passed, and each time, Paul Blackwell has been the swing vote.”

Dread clenched my stomach like an iron vise.

Unfortunately, even with the new unspoken hostility between them, Blackwell and Malone still shared a few ideological tenets, such as the belief that strays had no place within a Pride, and that a tabby's primary responsibility is to provide her territory with its next generation. So if Blackwell could be counted upon to vote his conscience—and history had already proved that he would—he would have to support Malone in most policy changes intended to hurt me and/or Marc.

Shit.
“What's passed so far?”

“New Alphas must be approved by a simple majority of the council before they will be officially recognized,” my uncle said, his frown deepening until I thought his face would collapse in on itself.

That one could be aimed at either me or Marc, and would no doubt apply to Jace, too, if his father had any idea how much of a threat Jace had become. “Wow, they're planning way ahead. What else passed?”

My uncle sighed. “All Prides must pay a monthly stipend to a discretionary fund that will be used to finance council business.”

“What kind of business?” Marc asked, as he drained the first skillet of beef.

“Establishing a new, permanent council headquarters, hiring new enforcers as needed…”

Anger burned in the back of my throat, where a growl itched to form. “For which Pride? Malone's, I assume? We're supposed to pay for him to hire new thugs? No way in he—”

“Not for him,” my father interjected, before I could complete the planned profanity. “Enforcers for the council at large, to handle any issue that involves more than
one Pride. They'll be like state troopers, to our city police.”

“That one's a direct shot at your dad,” Uncle Rick added. “For handling the Manx issue on his own instead of turning it over to the council.”

It took real effort to make my pulse stop racing, and to keep my teeth from Shifting out of fury. “Is that it?” If those were the laws that passed with Blackwell's vote, I could only imagine what kind of horrible proposals he'd actually found objection to.

“Those are the most threatening so far.” Di Carlo ran one hand through hair still thick and dark in his late fifties. “But we're supposed to debate one more this afternoon….” He glanced at his fellow Alphas, none of whom seemed inclined to complete Di Carlo's aborted sentence.

Every hair on my body stood straight up. “What? What's the new proposal?”

Finally my father sighed and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking more pessimistic and frustrated than I'd seen him in a very long time. At least when Ethan died, he'd gotten angry. I'd much rather see him angry than discouraged. “Faythe… His new proposal says that no woman can serve as an enforcer until she's given birth to a daughter.”

Noooo…

My uncle took one look at the horror surely clear on my face and rushed to explain. “Originally the policy said that no women should be allowed to serve, period, but Blackwell balked at that, so Malone tacked on the daughter codicil. And it looks like Blackwell's going to support that one, too.”

Of course he was. He'd always believed that I was better suited to a diaper bag than a pair of handcuffs.

“The problem is that there's no good way to protest that one,” Di Carlo said. “If we want to survive as a species, we
do
need…” His voice trailed off, but we all knew how that sentence should have ended.

I'd grown up knowing one great, pervasive truth, and had discovered another since I started working for my father. The first was that in order to survive, the south-central Pride needed me to give them children. Because of a genetic inconvenience, there were usually four to six boys born before each daughter, and like most tabbies, I was the only girl in my family. The vacancy of my womb meant the end of my family tree and extinction for my Pride. There was no way around that.

The second—equally important—was that I wanted to serve as an enforcer, and some day as an Alpha. I had yet to come up with a compromise between my own personal rock and hard place, and until I did, the council—especially now that Malone was leading it—would use that against me.

It's not that I was opposed to the idea of having children. I never had been. However, if, when, and with whom were
my
decisions to make, and no one had the right to take those choices from me. But Malone had obviously found a new way to try.

I blinked, but the room refused to come back into focus. My blood raced so quickly the whole cabin seemed to spin. I glanced at my father, desperately wishing he would tell me I'd heard wrong. That Malone wasn't trying to get me fired and sentence me to serial childbirth, all in one fell swoop.

But he couldn't.

I dumped the dry noodles into the pot, struggling to control my temper, then turned to face the rest of the room again.

“So we're agreed? Malone must die.”

 

The cabin got quiet after lunch. The Alphas had gone to the main lodge to try to keep the most sexist policy proposal ever written from becoming official Pride law, and I could do nothing but wait for the outcome. And ponder my future. And wash the dishes.

Teo and Vic had volunteered to make one of their mother's recipes for dinner. Teo went to town for supplies and Vic had insisted on going with him, ostensibly to make sure his older brother didn't mess anything up.

But the truth was that he didn't want to be near me and Jace. He was taking our relationship almost as hard as Marc was, and had barely said a civil word to either of us since we'd gone public. I think he was even a little mad at Marc for not pressuring me harder for a decision. Or killing Jace.

Jace had offered to help with the dishes, but I sent him into the living room for a tense, overtly hostile game of cards with Marc and my cousin Lucas, who tried to keep the peace. I needed time alone to think, and I wasn't up to watching Marc watch me and Jace, waiting for our hands to touch accidentally on purpose in the soapy water.

I'd just set the last plate in the dish drainer when the rumble of an engine drew my gaze to the front window. I expected to see Vic and Teo Di Carlo returning in the rental van, but instead, I saw a gray sedan passing
slowly on the narrow gravel road that ran across the cabin complex.

The car was unfamiliar, but there was no mistaking Colin Dean's shock of white-blond hair in the driver's seat. There was second man in the front passenger seat and a third in the back, both facing away from me. But as they drove directly in front of our cabin, Dean gestured toward it, and the other toms turned to look. And my heart literally skipped a beat.

I knew them both. The big guy up front was Gary Rogers, whom I still half thought of as Deep Throat. I'd broken his arm to get him to talk, in the woods behind Malone's property when we'd snuck in to get Lance Pierce. And the tom directly behind him was Jess…something or other. Jess had pinned, then groped, me, and Marc had bitten off the offending thumb and left him to bleed next to the grave they'd dug for Jace.

What the hell were they doing in Montana? Even if Malone thought he needed extra security, those two would surely have been his last choice, after failing to stop me and Marc from rescuing Jace and taking Lance. Which only left one possible reason for their presence: they were witnesses.

“Guys!” I twisted the faucet too hard and it creaked beneath my grip until I loosened it.

Marc put his cards down, and they all three looked up as I crossed the kitchen into the living room. “Dean just drove onto the complex with Gary Rogers and Jess what's-his-name. I think Malone's going to charge us. Soon.”

“That figures.” Jace frowned but didn't look particularly worried.

“Well, it's not like we didn't see it coming.” Marc
scooped up the rest of the cards and tapped them into a neat stack in preparation to shuffle. “We'll tell your dad when he gets back, but if we go through with the attack, some stupid trespassing and assault charge is going to be a pretty moot point, right? It's not like Malone's going to be around to oversee a trial.”