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22
Challenging the Alpha
LUKE
Rage and shock coursing through me, I retook my position by my father’s side at the platform by the fighting ring, like a good little Enforcer. He lounged in the gold-painted chair, while the Alphas of the other packs stood on each side of us.
As soon as I was close enough, he snapped out a question, thick with Alpha command. “What the hell did you do, son? Get over here.” I shuffled closer, feeling the eyes of the other Alphas on us.
The crowd’s buzz rose in pitch as my mate unscrewed the mop head and threw it into the throng. The announcer was speaking to Flor, bowing to her, and I marveled at her poise. Her outward calm.
I fought to hold onto my own as my Alpha gestured for me to kneel at his side, and gripped the side of my neck with one hand. The skin broke under his lengthening nails, blood flowing freely from the deep punctures in my throat, and I swallowed hard. If he squeezed a little harder, dug those nails just a bit to the side, he’d hit my carotid. With my existing injury already weakening me, I wasn’t sure my wolf’s healing could ensure I’d survive an arterial puncture.
“You gave her a weapon, boy?”
I forced a sneer. “A mop isn’t a weapon, it’s an insult. The other packs needed to hear she’s nothing. A pack reject, not some secret warrior.” I tried not to flinch at the low growls from the other visiting shifters who heard me.
“You need a lesson in leadership,” he snarled, but let go of my neck.
“Yes, Alpha.” I kept my gaze lowered as I stood, but his expression promised a world of pain as soon as we were alone.
Glen’s mother Margarette stood next to her mate Bradley, who was the Head of the North American Council. Bradley frowned at me, but Margarette’s deep blue eyes were filled with compassion. I’d stayed at Northern years ago for a few days, and for that short time, she’d made me feel like I had a mother again. Until I’d been driven to return home, to Southern.
To Flor.
Margarette opened her mouth now to speak to me, but I shook my head slightly.
Not an hour before, I’d slipped Glen evidence of my father’s crimes, hoping he would give it to his parents. Not just indications of financial mismanagement, which would only merit an investigation, but a new scrap of evidence I’d found earlier that week that pointed to worse. It was proof of one of the most hideous crimes one of our kind could commit. A death sentence for any shifter, Alpha or not.
To my surprise, Glen had slipped me a torn page from a recent Northern American Combined Pack Law book that spelled out the recent loophole to provide Flor her makeshift weapon. I’d studied pack law, but we didn’t have the most recent editions in our Pack House library.
“That young woman could kill a grizzly bear with a mop,” Glen had suggested, snarling when I demanded an explanation. “I’ll leave one near the ring. You need to get it to her.”
Everything was balanced on a knife’s edge now, my wolf raging louder than it ever had. The crowd howled and gasped and jeered at my mate as she defended herself. It was all I could do not to run into the ring, and proclaim to all the assembled packs that she was mine, my mate. I didn’t care about my pain. All I cared about was her. Flor, the woman who was holding her own against one of the strongest and most corrupt shifters in our pack.
She was so small, so thin. A miracle.
I was powerless to truly help her, as I had always been, even with shifters here for once who might be allies. If Margarette read what I passed on, though—if she put it together, shared it with the other Council members... it could save us all.
Save her.
The night before, I’d run by the storm drain I knew she was in, to make sure her scent wasn’t detectable to any other shifters. I could always scent her, even when no one else could. I’d assumed she’d try to stay close enough to hear when the fights were starting. She hadn’t used that spot often enough for her scent to gather at the entrance, and it was by far the most secure.
She would never know how often I’d scented her and diverted the other males away from her hiding places. How often I’d come up with stupid tasks for the unmated males to complete far away from the compound, to keep her safe.
Even before she was declared the prey in the pack’s Hunt, I’d done everything I could to keep her safe. It had worked, mostly. I’d even been able to throw the other Enforcers off her trail for those first few weeks after the announcement.
Of course, most of her success was her own. I found myself smiling as she used the mop to break Trevor’s leg in the ring a second time. A compound fracture, one he couldn’t heal without help. Only the sound of my Alpha and his Head Enforcers cursing hid my cackle of laughter.
Good girl. Don’t let up.
She was so much faster and sneakier than any other shifter. Stronger, in the way that mattered in the long run. She might be small and underfed—how often had I left meat on my plate when I was still hungry, knowing she would get it when the meal was over?—but she was tougher than a shifter had any right to be. Harder.
Trevor was the only one besides the Alpha that she truly feared. I had smelled the acrid stench of terror on her earlier, and wanted to tell her she had nothing to worry about.
But she’d been cornered by the fucker years before, when I was away leading the younger male shifters on their first pack deer hunt, and that day had broken her.
I’d redoubled my efforts to protect her. But even if she knew, she would never forgive me. I was to blame for her mother’s death—one of them, in her mind. I’d parroted the Southern leadership’s laws and rules, even when I suspected they weren’t being followed by the ones who ruled.
