Alpha

“I got it.” I took the rag from him and perfunctorily cleaned my neck and chest, while he stared at the floor, obviously determined not to watch. To think about something else. When I was done, I dropped the rag on the end table and turned to lean against the couch arm, my legs folded beneath me to keep distance between us.

Jace frowned at me, his intense gaze searching mine. He’d found something else to focus on, and I could already tell I wouldn’t like the change of subject. “Do you really dream about it? About being in that basement?”

I stared into my lap, where my fingers tried to twist one another into knots, until Jace’s hand closed over them. “You think I’d make that up?”

“You never said anything. Does Marc know?”

I nodded. “How could he not?”

Jace inhaled deeply, and I heard his pulse speed up. “If sleeping alone makes it worse…you don’t have to sleep alone.” I looked up with one brow raised, but he rushed on. “I’m not asking for anything. I’m just saying…I’m here.”

My heart ached, like it was too full to fit in my chest, and I blinked to keep him from seeing that. “Yeah. Until Marc kills you.”

“I’d like to see him try.”

“I wouldn’t.”

Footsteps clomped up the stairs, and Jace moved a foot away on the couch. The door swung open and Marc took us both in. He scowled, but made no comment. We hadn’t broken the rules—technically.

“Here.” He tossed the clean shirt at me and I stood to put it on. “You better hurry. Angela just turned into the driveway.”

Chapter Two

I jogged across the backyard toward the main house, Marc and Jace on my heels. We burst through the back door, and they passed me when I stopped in the guest bathroom to make sure my shirt was straight and there were no leaves in my hair. I had gotten all the blood off my neck, but I had to wash my hands to get Ryan’s scent off my right fist, which was when I discovered I’d split two of my knuckles on his face. Crap.

None of my fellow cats would give it a second thought; they’d assume I’d assaulted the hanging bag without my gloves again. But Angela…She probably wouldn’t know what to make of my split knuckles, not to mention the thin white line bisecting my left cheek. At least my sleeve covered the long, zigzag of new scar tissue on my left forearm—that was one less question to answer. Assuming she was bold enough to actually ask.

Her engine growled out front, and my pulse spiked almost painfully. Why was I so nervous? Well, truthfully, everyone was nervous. It isn’t every day you meet your dead brother’s pregnant girlfriend. A human girlfriend, at that. And she had no idea that we weren’t completely human, so a good deal of the ambient tension had to do with hiding our little secret, so she didn’t run screaming into the…broad daylight.

The rest of it had to do with the baby. Ethan’s baby, whose existence we’d only discovered the day we buried my brother. A tiny piece of him we’d had no reason to hope for. The grandchild my parents never expected.

That baby was a genetic miracle, and we desperately wanted Angela to like us. To want to include us in her child’s life.

Yet my own nerves went beyond that. They were a complex mix of jealousy, nostalgia, and relief over my near miss with a tragically mundane life.

Angela would be my first up-close look at anything resembling normalcy since I’d left grad school. The freedom I’d once fought for was now gone—choked out of existence by the iron grip of responsibility—and the life I’d once run from had reclaimed me. I’d made my own choices, and while I had undeniably moved past that escapist phase of my life, there was some tiny part of me that leaned toward panic at the knowledge that I couldn’t go back now even if I wanted to.

I stared into the mirror, trying to see myself as she would see me. Tangled hair, scarred cheek, skinned knuckles. My face was too thin, my arms and shoulders too well-defined. And there was a hardness behind my eyes now, difficult to describe, but impossible to miss.

I’d seen and done things that would have put most women my age in a padded room. I’d fought for my life, my freedom, and my family. I’d been kidnapped, beaten, broken, clawed, and stabbed. I’d caught rogues, and killed killers, and I’d watched my brother die. It was hard to believe that less than a year ago, I’d been a student like Angela.

Minus the whole faulty-condom-turned-miracle thing.

My mother appeared in the bathroom doorway, nervously twisting her wedding ring as I tried to fingercomb my hair. “She’s here.”

“So I heard.” I turned away from my identity crisis and smiled, almost amused to see her so flustered. My mom hadn’t blinked an eye when she’d faced down a jungle stray in her own basement, but now she looked ready to lose her breakfast. “It’ll be fine,” I insisted, while doubt rang in my head, soft but insistent. There was no way we’d come off like the average American household. The Addams Family had a better shot.

What if Angela knew something was scary-different about us, and she took off with Ethan’s baby? What if she decided not to have it?

“Maybe we shouldn’t do this.” My mother straightened her freshly pressed blouse, and the high arch of her brows managed to convey both eagerness and dread. “I mean, obviously we should help her financially, but maybe we should…keep our distance. It’s not really a good time, with you all leaving tomorrow…”

After months of waiting, lobbying, and fighting on the sidelines, our big day had finally come. Marc, Jace, and I would accompany my father to a meeting of the full Territorial Council, ostensibly for the vote that could reinstate him as council chair—or put Jace’s megalomaniac stepfather, Calvin Malone, in power. But our real reason for going was to present hard-won evidence against Malone as a traitor to our species and hopefully put him out of the running. And completely out of power.

I shoved aside my own doubts and linked my arm through hers to keep her from twisting her own fingers off. “The timing is out of our hands,” I said, and she could only nod. “Let’s just try not to overwhelm her.”

I stepped into the hall, half tugging my mother, and rolled my eyes when I saw Brian, Parker, and Vic peering through the sidelight windows. “Guys. Come on. We’re trying not to overwhelm her.”

Brian shrugged, looking younger than ever, and Vic just frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. “You really think there’s any chance of that?”

“If you guys lay off the stares and turn on the charm, yeah.” Though privately I had my doubts. “Remember, you’re normal, nonfurry ranch hands and good friends of the family.” That was close enough to the truth to be believable—if the Lazy S had been a functioning ranch. And if ranch hands were trained to protect their Alpha, patrol their territory, and take down bad guys with badass paw-to-paw combat.

“Brian, go tell my dad she’s here,” I said, and he took off dutifully toward the office, which was virtually soundproof with the door closed, thanks to solid concrete walls.

“This is so weird.” Parker ran one hand through straight salt-and-pepper hair. “Ethan would have been a dad. I can’t picture it.”

“I can.” I steered him away from the door, hoping Angela wouldn’t smell the whiskey on his breath. At one o’clock in the afternoon.

My mother ducked into the living room to tweak an arrangement of snacks, and I squeezed in next to Vic to peek out the window. Our guest still sat in her car with the driver’s-side door open, digging in her purse for something. But I had the distinct impression that she was stalling.

I couldn’t decide who was more nervous—Angela or my mom. Or me.

“Scoot over,” Kaci said, and I turned to find the young tabby standing behind me, hazel eyes wide, long brown hair pulled into a thick wavy ponytail at the base of her neck. Kaci didn’t look nervous. She looked curious. And skeptical.

Ethan’s death had hit her very hard, and she now seemed both fascinated to meet his only remaining link to the world and ambivalent to the woman who’d known a very different side of him. “She looks…normal.”

Jace laughed. “You were expecting two heads?”

Kaci only frowned. “How come she’s just sitting in her car?”

Marc spoke up from the dining room doorway, making no attempt to look through the window. “I’m sure she’s nervous.”

And she hadn’t even met our brood yet. “Okay, why don’t you guys all go sit, so we don’t overwhelm her the moment she walks in the door.”

Marc’s frown mirrored Kaci’s, but he herded the thirteen-year-old tabby toward the living room and shot one last irritated glance at me and Jace before stepping through the doorway and out of sight. I’d been nominated for the welcoming committee because I was the only tabby near her age—at least, the only one with flawless English—and Jace got to play because he’d set up the meeting with Angela. He’d dated her twin for a few weeks, back when Ethan and Angela first started going out.

Yes, Jace and Ethan dated twins. Seriously.

Jace stepped closer to me in the deserted hallway, ostensibly to look through the window, and the warmth from his chest leached through the back of my shirt. “You ready?” he asked, but the question felt loaded, like Angela was the last thing on his mind.

Mom was right; the timing could not have been worse.

I sighed. “Not even kind of.”

He turned me by both shoulders and grinned down at me. “She won’t bite. And she’s probably the only person within a square mile who can swear to that right now.”

“That’s part of the problem.”

I opened the door, and Angela looked up when we stepped onto the porch. Then she took a deep breath and got out of the car.

She’s so young, I thought, taking in her slim form and freckled cheeks. But she was only a year younger than I was, and twenty-two really wasn’t that young to be a first-time mother. Even today, most tabbies already had a son or two by Angela’s age.

I smiled, and her mouth turned up in a nervous reflection of my own expression. Then she noticed the tom behind me, and her whole face brightened.

“Jace!” She sounded so familiar I had to fight a sharp jolt of jealousy, though I knew she and Jace had never been involved. But I was suddenly irritated by the realization that she knew more about some part of his life than I did. And even more about Ethan’s. “I wasn’t sure you’d be here.”

“Like I’d let you walk into the lion’s den all alone,” he teased, and that streak of jealousy in me grew stronger as her smile widened. Though Jace and Ethan had rarely ever sat at home on the weekends, I couldn’t remember ever actually seeing him interact with someone outside the sphere of our secret existence. He was…different. Relaxed and confident, showing no sign of the power struggle with Marc or the bloodlust we’d all been battling for weeks now.

I was amazed that he could turn all that off and set her at ease. And beneath my jealousy, I was grateful, because none of the rest of us knew Angela well enough to play Virgil, guiding her through the hell our world had become since Ethan’s death.

“Don’t worry, they’re all eager to meet you,” Jace said, and I followed him down the steps, hanging back when she hugged him, clinging to him like a life raft in a storm.

“Andrea still asks about you,” she said, when he finally pulled away.

Jace stiffened, like he wanted to glance back at me, and pulled one hand through his hair. “How is she?”

“Fine. Surprised.” She grinned and ran one hand over her flat stomach, and some vague tension in me eased. She was happy to be pregnant. She didn’t resent Ethan’s baby, and that made me like her, in spite of her familiar manner with Jace. “She’s excited to be an aunt.”

So was I.

I’d never expected to be related by blood to a child who wasn’t mine. Few toms ever had children, and though Ethan was a great fighter, he wasn’t a leader. He would never have been an Alpha, nor would he have settled in a childless human marriage like Michael. So if not for Angela and her baby, we would have nothing left of him but memories.

My eyes watered at the thought of a baby with Ethan’s green eyes, and a shock of his black hair.

“Is that her?” Angela asked, and I glanced up, surprised.

“Yeah.” Jace waved me forward, and I took the last two steps slowly. “Faythe, this is Angela Raymond. Angie, this is Faythe, Ethan’s sister.”

“It’s so great to meet you.” She threw her arms around my neck, and I stumbled back in surprise. But Angela was unfazed, so I patted her back awkwardly. “The guys talked about you all the time,” she said, when she finally let go, and her blue-eyed gaze met mine frankly, after a brief, puzzled glance at my scarred left cheek. Obviously they hadn’t mentioned that. “I feel like I already know you.”

Oh, I doubt that…

But she was so wide-eyed—so earnest, in spite of her nerves—that it was impossible not to smile back at her. Not to like her.

Ethan had considered himself a player. He’d had no trouble lovin’ ‘n’ leavin’ girl after girl. Until Angela. And now, seeing her, hearing her, I understood why she’d outlasted the others, and I wondered if, given time, she might have actually won a place in his heart, instead of just his bed.

“Everyone’s excited to meet you,” Jace said, gesturing toward the front door.

“Everyone?” Her forehead furrowed and she looked at the house as if it might swallow her whole.

“Don’t worry.” Jace put one hand at her back to guide her forward. “Meeting them is the easy part.” He glanced back at me and winked. “Remembering the names might be a bit of a challenge.”

I closed Angela’s car door, then followed them inside.

The house was silent, but for the whispered breaths and excited heartbeats coming from the living room, which Angela probably couldn’t hear. Everyone was listening. Waiting. Eager for the first up-close glimpse.

This was unprecedented. We’d only recently learned that humans and werecats could sire children, and while strays were proof that that had happened—to be “infected,” a human must already carry a recessive gene donated by a werecat somewhere in the family tree—there were very few cases of toms actually claiming their illegitimate children. And all of those cases were very recent because, before, such pregnancies had been considered impossible.

Ethan’s baby would be born human, and the difference between his blood and his mother’s would be small enough to avoid detection in the basic newborn tests, as had been happening for decades with potential strays. So my nephew—the baby would almost certainly be a boy—would have no true place in our violent, complicated world until and unless he was one day scratched or bitten by a werecat. And infection was still a capital crime, even between blood relatives, a concept we as a species had only recently been forced to confront.

As Angela stepped through the front door into our house—our Pride’s headquarters ever since my father became Alpha—I tried to imagine what we must look like to her. What we must feel like. Most humans lacked the appropriate mental compartment in which to file us. They would sense something different about us, but be unable to say what. We might scare her. We might fascinate her. We might never see her again.

That was my mother’s worst fear.

Jace led her to the first room on the right, and Angela stopped cold in the doorway. Her smile froze, then faded into uncertainty as her focus skipped from face to face, none of which I could see from the hall.

We were a motley bunch at best—even compared to most other Prides—and we were a lot for a human to take in at once. Especially a newly pregnant college student, whose boyfriend had just died.

This was as hard for her as it was for us.

Sympathy for Angela flooded me, and I gave Jace a little shove. He raised one brow at me but moved over, and I edged past Angela into the living room to make the introductions. To represent my family and try to bridge the gap between worlds.

All the men had stood when we’d entered the room, and every last one of them stared straight at her. I sighed in frustration and rolled my eyes at several of them. Way to look normal, guys. I forced a laugh and turned back to her. “Did Ethan tell you we have a big extended family?”

She nodded hesitantly.

“I know it’s kind of overwhelming, but everyone really wanted to meet you.” Though in retrospect, introducing her to the entire household at once seemed like an extraordinarily bad plan.

She nodded again, mute.

I led her to the right and we worked our way around the room. She shook hands, and I made brief introductions and explanations. My fellow enforcers were first.

“Angela, this is Brian, Vic, and Marc. They work for my father.”

“On the ranch? Like Jace?” Her eyes lit up; she was pleased to have found some logic to cling to in the sea of confusion we’d tossed her into.

“Um, yeah.” They each shook her hand and welcomed her, but Marc eyed Jace as he followed us around the room.

Next came Kaci. “This is my cousin Karli.” The identity under which she would attend school, once everything had calmed down. Assuming that ever happened.

“Hi, Karli,” Angela said, obviously more at ease with a young girl than with a room full of strange men.

“Hey. So, you’re gonna have Ethan’s baby?” Kaci said, after a frank, curious glance at Angela’s flat belly. “Well, I guess it’s your baby, too. But I hope it looks like him, at least a little bit.”

Angela smiled. “Me, too.” And just like that, she’d won Kaci over.

While we crossed the rug toward Owen, he bent to help Manx up, with Des in her arms. Her hands were carefully arranged beneath the folds of the baby’s blankets, so that her fingers—the nails ruined from her recent declawing—wouldn’t show. “And this is my brother Owen.”

Owen shot her a friendly, lopsided grin, and stuck out one calloused hand for hers, his other arm around Manx. “Pleased to meet you. I’m just sorry Ethan isn’t here to make the introductions.”

“So am I.” Angela shook his hand warmly, then her gaze was drawn to Des’s face as he yawned and stretched one chubby arm from beneath his blanket. “And who’s this? Ethan didn’t mention a nephew.”

Owen flushed, but stroked the baby’s face with one long finger. “Mercedes is a friend of the family, and this is her son, Desiderio.”

“How beautiful!” Angela said, when Manx tilted her bundle forward so her child could be admired.

“Please forgive me for not shaking,” she said, and Angela smiled at her exotic accent.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ve got your hands full.”

Manx smiled in relief and glanced at Owen, who beamed back at her. She’d been nervous about hiding her hands, no matter how many times he’d assured her that it wouldn’t be an issue.

“Dad?” I said, and my father stepped forward in his usual suit, minus the jacket. “This is my father, Greg Sanders.” It felt weird not to add his title after the basic introduction, but Angela wouldn’t even know what an Alpha was, and telling her—exposing our existence to a human—would only get me brought up on more charges.

She held out her hand and my father shook it formally, studying her face like he’d be tested on it later. “It’s so good to finally meet you. I see now why Ethan tried to keep you all to himself.”

Angela blushed, and I stared at my father in surprise. Who’d have known he could be charming, when he wasn’t barking out orders?

“And this is my mother,” I said, as my mom clasped her hands in front of her own perfectly pressed slacks. “Karen Sanders.”

Angela took a deep breath, and I almost laughed out loud at the sudden realization that in a room full of large, strange men, she was more nervous to meet my mom than anyone else. What the hell had Ethan told her about our mother? Or was there some sort of ritualistic meet-the-mom nerves I’d been spared by virtue of the fact that Marc—an orphan—was my only long-term relationship?

Angela held out one shaking hand, and Mom took it in both of hers. “I’m so very happy to meet you,” my mother said, looking directly into her eyes. “And I want you to know that you—and your child—are always welcome here. We hope you’ll bring him to see us often.”

I frowned. Mom was a little over the top, but she couldn’t help it. She’d been dreaming of grandchildren for years, and this one in particular was such an unexpected blessing.

Angela burst into tears. Her hands flew up to wipe her cheeks, and she sucked in a great, hiccupping breath, trying to stop the flow.

“Oh, come sit,” my mother insisted, already guiding Angela toward the couch.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed, blotting beneath her eyes with the tissue my mother plucked from a box on the end table. “This has just all happened so fast, and I was afraid you guys would be mad, or think I was a…But you’re so nice…” The tears started again. “Thank you.”

My mom sank onto the couch next to Angela and wrapped an arm around her shoulders while the rest of us stared, speechless. “We’re just so glad you want to involve us in the baby’s life.”

After a couple of minutes, Angela had herself under control, and my mom fixed her a plate of tiny sandwiches and sliced fruit.

“So, how far along are you?” my mother asked. “And have you seen a doctor yet?”

“Yes, just for the initial visit. He says I’m thirteen weeks along.”

My mom’s eyes widened. “Three months. Wow. There’s so much to do!” I could practically see the gears spinning behind her eyes. But my father was more practical.

“We’d like to help with the cost either way, of course,” he began, and Angela’s forehead furrowed. “But if you’re interested, we have a family physician who would be glad to see you.”

Dr. Carver, of course.

“Um, sure,” she said. “I’ll meet him.”

While she and my mother chatted softly, the guys all filled plates, then stood around the room snacking, and almost reverently observing the miracle that Angela and her child represented for us. It was the single most peaceful, optimistic moment we’d experienced since Ethan’s death, and I never wanted it to end.

Unfortunately, Angela’s introduction into our family felt very much to me like the calm before the inevitable storm. And I could already feel the clouds gathering…

Chapter Three

Montana. Again. Because the last visit worked out so well…

I hauled my duffel from the rear floorboard of the rental car and glanced up at the cabin as phantom pain in my side heralded an avalanche of memories. I’d shed blood and spilled blood here. I’d loved Marc and let him go. I’d found Kaci, killed bad guys, and narrowly avoided execution.

That cabin and I had a love-hate relationship, almost as complicated as my history with Marc. But Montana was an appropriate setting for this particular council meeting. Calvin Malone should be ousted where he’d first begun his quest for werecat world domination.

Malone would try to prevent the council—the majority of which harbored no fondness for my Pride—from hearing our evidence, I had no doubt. But I was prepared to shout the list of his crimes from the nearest mountain top, if need be. And to shove the bloody evidence of his guilt down the other Alphas’ throats, if it would help.

“You okay?” Jace lifted the duffel strap from my shoulder. If he could relieve my emotional burden so simply, he would. Jace was no longer as easy to understand as he’d been a month earlier.

“Yeah. I’m good.” That was an outright lie, but it was one I clung to. Survival had become a game of bluffing. Of putting on my game face and pretending I wasn’t worried. That I didn’t have everything in the world riding on this meeting.

But I did.

If Calvin Malone were voted into power, we would have to remove him by force. Otherwise, he would make life hell for the south-central Pride and our allies, because we were everything he hated. Everything that threatened his tunnel vision of werecat society as his own personal autocracy. In Malone’s paradise, membership would be by invitation only. Not open to those lacking purebred pedigrees. Inaccessible to those without a Y chromosome, unless they bent to his will.