Page 185

Cass first, in her own truck, then two more behind her, and by the time I've crossed the yard there are eleven wolves standing in the frost between my porch and the road. Eleven, same as last night. I'd hoped for twelve.

Tobin gets out last, slow, one hand on the door frame he's held onto since before I was born.

And Ansel is with him.

He's fifty-four and he's never once raised his voice at me. He looks at my house. He looks at the wolves. He works out the math in front of everyone, unhurried, the way you'd read a menu.

"Eight of these are mine, Gage."

Cass shifts her weight. I put two fingers down at my side and she stops.

"Say it," I tell him.

"The covens will settle it tonight one way or the other. Both of them want her. Neither of them wants us." Ansel spreads his hands wider. "So we hand her to the Lantern before dark. They put her behind their gates, they fight it out with the other lot in their own house, and forty of us wake up on the first of November with our kids in their beds. Clean hands. Old rules."

"She was offered the gates this morning. She said no."

"She's not pack. She doesn't get a vote on what pack does."

There it is.

"Say the rest of it," Tobin says quietly.

Ansel turns his head. He's annoyed, which means Tobin has gotten ahead of him.

"Someone's going to say it," Tobin says, "so it might as well be an old man."

He looks at me and he doesn't enjoy any part of this. "There's a version where she is pack, Gage. There's a version where by six o'clock tonight nobody in this yard has a choice about defending her, because she's yours in the way that means the rest of us are hers too. You've known that since April. Half of us have known about it since Friday."

Eleven wolves go very still in the cold.

"You could end this argument standing right there," Ansel says. "One night. She'd never have to know it wasn't her idea."

Something comes up my throat that isn't words.

Cass moves before I do. She gets herself between me and Ansel with both hands flat on my chest, five foot four of her, and she says, "Boss," once, and it's enough.

I get my voice down to where I can use it.

"You just told me to take away a woman's choice in her own yard, in front of her, on the worst day of her life, and call it protecting my pack."

"I told you to keep forty people alive."

"My father would've agreed with you." My hands are shaking. I let them. "He did the same thing to my mother and he was proud of it until the day he died. She lived a miserable life. I had to watch it every morning of my life."

Nobody in the yard breathes.

Tobin closes his eyes.

"If they take the title off me tonight, take it." I look around at all of them, one at a time, because they came out here in the cold and they deserve to have someone look at them.

"I'll hand it over on the porch and I'll still be standing in front of that mansion at midnight. Losing this would cost me something. I'd survive it. But, there's exactly one thing I wouldn't survive and it isn't a title."

Ansel doesn't move for a long moment.

Then he says, "You've made this about your father."

"It’s always been about not being like my father."