Wolf Queen

by Alexis Pierce

  It isn’t long before she finishes, her cunt squeezing around my fingers as her body shivers. I press my face into her neck, tracing my tongue over the mating scar I made on her throat right above her collarbone.

  “Eve,” she groans, her voice high and out of control. I bite down, not hard enough to draw blood as her aftershocks slow in frequency.

  Mine, the wolf inside me growls, and possessiveness floods my system. She may have slept with men in an attempt to gain power, but I’m the only one she wants now. Where Anderson and Thompson want each other, she only wants me.

  I remove my fingers from her, swiping over her clit one last time before I take my hand away from her pants.

  Gasping, she comes forward and rests her head on my shoulder, placing her hands on my hips. “It’s been too long,” she breathes, her hot breath tickling my throat.

  I nod, but I don’t say anything. Instead, I stroke her back, content to just be holding her.

  We can’t stay like this forever, though. I have other business to take care of.

  Chapter Three

  Eve

  I’ve called every witch in St. Louis, but not one of them seems to know who put the spell on the apartment where I grew up. Something happened when my dad died, something that made the penthouse completely inaccessible. At first, I thought that I would be immune to the spell, but when I tried entering, my entire body froze up like I was being struck down by electricity.

  On the morning of the fourth, I wait in the conference room, reading through shady online resources on my phone for any hint of what I can do. Gloria is the first to arrive. Her middle-aged appearance means that she’s at least a hundred years old, one of the oldest wolves in the pack. She carries an old wooden box, and her dark eyes dart around, betraying her paranoia.

  “I’m glad you came,” I say, standing up to grasp her forearm respectfully. She gives a tight smile.

  “Sorry for the tension,” she says. “It’s been so long since this place has felt safe.”

  I nod with understanding. Kenneth ruled by implementing fear in the hearts of the pack, so that’s what they’re all used to. I’ve seen the looks that some of his closer followers have been giving me for a couple of months, though. They don’t trust me, don’t believe that Kenneth is the one who killed my father. Years of indoctrination can be difficult to eschew.

  Thompson and Anderson arrive together. I sent them to the basement to get the last year’s financial records, and their scents are strongly mixed. I roll my eyes. They can’t seem to keep their hands off each other for a moment since we almost died in May.

  “It’s not great,” Thompson says apologetically, dropping two cardboard boxes on the table. I cough as dust flies up, and it gets worse when Anderson does the same.

  Freya is the last to arrive, and she has a neat binder with printed sheets from the computer in my office. The thin stack of papers inside throws me. Shouldn’t there be more records from the past decade on that computer? Her face is just as grim as I feel.

  As she’s the last person invited to this meeting, I wave for her to close the door. She even goes so far as to lock it, and all eyes dart from the door to me.

  “What’s going on?” Gloria asks. I chew the skin inside my cheek. Kenneth kept everything a secret from the pack, including the dire financial situation that was going to force him to sell the building. Our home.

  “The short of it is, we’re broke,” I say. It’s easier to just rip the bandage off, I suppose. I don’t really know what else I’m supposed to do. “Kenneth really fucked us over.”

  Nobody seems too surprised at this information. Kenneth was an absolute imbecile who had no place running this pack.

  The next part is a lot harder for me, though. From the leather pouch strapped to my hip and thigh, I remove the planner that I’d stolen from my father the day he was murdered.

  Gloria’s eyes are the first to widen. She knows, then. My mates, on the other hand, just seem confused.

  “Where did you get that?” Gloria demands, standing and pressing her hands into the wooden tabletop, almost like she’s bracing herself.

  This is what Kenneth spent over a decade searching for. This is why he forced Thompson to go through all the pack’s files. This is why the pack is broke.

  “I had it with me when Dad died,” I say. My mates still don’t understand, so I look at each of them in turn. “This is where he kept everything. Didn’t you ever wonder how the pack got by before he died? How we lived in decadence and wealth?”

  Gloria’s eyes are tinted with fear. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Eve,” she says, pushing the box toward me. Of course, my father would give her the other half of the puzzle.

  I unclip the leather latch and open the case, revealing more paperwork. Thompson stands up and grabs a sheet from the top.

  “This is just a recipe,” he says.

  I shake my head. “It’s a code.”

  I open the planner to the back pages, browned with age. “My father was the most feared kingpin in the nation,” I explain. “Kenneth wanted that fear, that respect, but he was never able to amount to my father’s success. Dad even made sure that, without the planner and the recipes, the successor wouldn’t be able to continue his legacy.”

  Understanding finally crosses Anderson’s face. His jaw drops, and Freya’s hands clench tight. “My parents. They used to do work for your dad. They never told me what it was, though. Said it was too dangerous.”

  I smile, but my chest is tight. This is such a precarious place to be. If I really get them involved, all these people will be in danger.

  “We need to comb through the records,” I explain. “Every unpaid debt, every broken connection. We need to fix it all.”

  Thompson lifts a hand like he’s in class. I prick an eyebrow at him, and his face flushes. When he speaks, though, his voice is strong. “What exactly are you proposing?” he asks.

  I smile at the question, but it’s a bitter expression. Everyone is watching me. If I fuck this up, I’ll never be respected again.

  “Torres, Taranis, whatever his name is? He’s dead. Which means…” I hesitate, feeling a little silly. This isn’t a movie. I start over. “Annika used to work with my father. She found Taranis’s old bases, a few of them, anyway. There’s some valuable shit there. If we can get it…”

  Freya finishes my sentence for me, “We could save the pack,” she breathes, and I nod solemnly.

  “I don’t fault any of you if you don’t want to be involved. Anyone who wants to leave the pack is free to do so, and you will face no repercussions.” I have to be reasonable, after all. I can’t force these people to do my bidding. As much as I refuse to admit my weakness aloud, I care deeply about each and every one of them.

  They consider my words carefully. My heart races, but it’s good that they’re not being cavalier about this. Anderson especially tends to go into things without thinking about it. Hell, he’s mated to me, of all people, because of a whim.

  Freya leans back in her chair. “I’m in.” Her eyes are hard and steady, and my heart races at her gaze. I honestly thought she might pull out, but then I recall that she was deep on the inside, plotting against Kenneth long before I ever came back. If anyone here is brave enough to take on the legacy that my father left, it’s her.

  “Me, too,” Thompson says, shocking me. I turn my eyes to Anderson, who’s still considering. When he realized how much danger I was in after first arriving in St. Louis, he tried to run. I know his motivations are pure, but right now, I need the ruthless side of him.

  He frowns. “I will keep you safe. Even if you’re trying to do something massively stupid,” he finally says.

  Gloria doesn’t speak, but her presence alone proves that she’s going along with the plan. She worked closely with my parents when they were both alive. Despite her soft, motherly appearance, she’s probably more dangerous than any of us.

  “So we’re agreed, then,” I say. None of my mates seem parti
cularly happy about it, but they clearly understand the stakes here. If we don’t do something drastic, the pack’s home will be lost. With nearly a hundred members, we can’t risk it.

  Chapter Four

  Anderson

  Every instinct in my body is screaming at me to stop Eve. There has to be another way, right? Instead, I evaluate everyone else in this room. It’s an unspoken agreement that we won’t speak of any of this to anyone else in the pack, so I have to trust that Eve knows what she’s doing.

  We were going to lose everything if Eve hadn’t shown up. Would Kenneth have just abandoned the pack after selling the building? Probably.

  After the meeting ends, I go up to my parents’ apartment. They don’t look nearly as old as Gloria. For wolves, they had me pretty young. I’ve almost caught up to them in looks at this point.

  “Andy,” Mom says when she opens the door, her eyes bright. Knowing the danger that we’re about to go into, I can’t understand how she’s always been so cheerful. If she did the same type of stuff for Eve’s dad, she should be more somber, shouldn’t she?

  “Hi, Mom,” I say. Despite living in the same building, I don’t visit my parents nearly as often as I should. I lean down to give Mom a hug, and my dad rounds the corner from the kitchen. “Dad,” I say.

  His face is just as bright. “Andy, good to see you,” he says. The nickname has stuck for them, although everyone else in my life calls me Anderson. I kind of hate ‘Andy,’ but my parents can get away with it because I fucking adore them.

  “Good to see you, too,” I grumble. I move past my mom to collapse on the couch, which has a tiny chunk of fabric missing on the arm from when I took a pair of scissors to it as a kid.

  “Andy?” a voice screeches, and a little ball of energy that is my younger sister sprints in, leaping onto me, all the air coming out of me in a rush. Lydia is only twelve, but she’s already started shifting. Her powers are still totally out of control, but the fact that she can shift so young is a feat in itself. Right now, though, she’s in her human form.

  “Hey, Lydia,” I say, shoving her off me so she flops onto the carpeted floor. She sits up with a grin, and one of her eyes has a greenish-yellow bruise around it. Last time I sparred in the courtyard, she cheered for Freya against me. “Have you been sparring?”

  She shakes her head and giggles, her white-blonde hair flopping into her face. I glance up at Mom, who’s frowning.

  “She’s been getting into fights,” she says disapprovingly.

  I look back at my baby sister, who doesn’t look even slightly ashamed. I was the same at her age. Once, I punched a kid on the playground for calling Eve a freak to her face.

  “Did you win, at least?” I ask.

  “Anderson Frederick,” Mom says with her patented Mom Voice, and I flinch at her tone and the use of my first and middle names. I guess I shouldn’t really encourage Lydia with this sort of stuff.

  Still, Lydia nods at me with that same goofy grin. “Were you gonna take me to get ice cream?” she demands, and I roll my eyes. What a brat.

  I look at my mom again, whose gaze has turned hard and demanding.

  “Fine,” I say, “but on one condition.”

  Lydia crosses her arms. “What is it?”

  I ruffle her hair, and she chomps her teeth like she’s going to bite me, drawing a laugh from my chest. “No more picking fights,” I say very seriously. When I look at Mom out of the corner of my eye, she seems at least somewhat more approving.

  Lydia grumbles, then says, “Fine. No more picking fights.”

  She stands up and runs clumsily to her room, probably to find a pair of shoes for her awkwardly huge feet. She’s like a puppy, feet too big for her lanky body.

  Mom comes over and takes my face between her hands, her eyes inspecting me. “Is everything alright?” she asks.

  Exhaustion and vulnerability flood my system. Despite being a grown-ass man, my mom’s love and concern melt me.

  “What kind of stuff did you and Dad have to do for Richard?” I ask, my voice hushed to keep Lydia from overhearing.

  Mom frowns, her eyes filling with complex emotions. “I thought this might happen,” she says, her usually cheery voice turning grim. She pats me on the cheek. “Go have fun with your sister. We’ll talk about it tonight. Are you still coming to the celebration in the courtyard?”

  I nod, and Lydia comes bounding out of her room, carrying a holographic purse and wearing, of all things, a pair of crocs.

  “What are those?” I demand, drawing out the last syllable, and she looks at her feet with a frown.

  “They’re my crocs,” she says. I roll my eyes and put an arm around her shoulder, messing up her hair with my other hand.

  “Kids these days,” I say, although I had a similar pair of shoes when I was her age. How the hell did those things come back into fashion, anyway?

  She follows me out of the apartment, and I lead her down to the garage. I barely ever drive my little Toyota, but it starts right up without much complaint.

  “Shouldn’t you have a nice car now that you’re, like, Alpha or whatever?” Lydia asks, buckling herself into the passenger seat.

  I roll my eyes. “Are you talking shit about my car? We don’t have to get ice cream.” Mom would be pissed if she knew I cursed in front of Lydia, but it’s not like she hasn’t heard worse from the other kids her age.

  Lydia gasps like she’s totally scandalized, but she’s clearly just teasing me. “How dare you?” she says with an exaggerated British accent.

  I pull onto the highway and head south, and she practically vibrates with excitement. Every year since I got my driver’s license, I’ve taken Lydia to a firework shop south of the city that sells the good stuff you just can’t get in town.

  “So how’s Eve?” Lydia asks. She wasn’t even born yet when Eve left, but she seems super interested now. I look over, and she has her hands propped up in her hands.

  I laugh. “She’s fine. Busy with work. Being Alpha is a lot of responsibility, you know.”

  “Do you liiiiikkkkke her, though?” Lydia asks.

  I snort. “I mean, she’s my mate, so clearly.”

  “And have you had sex with her yet?”

  I almost slam on the brakes, the steering wheel slipping from my hands for an instant. “What the fuck, Lydia?” I ask, shocked at the question. “I don’t think that’s the sort of thing you should be asking.” My voice is far too high, but she doesn’t give up her line of questioning.

  “We did sex ed last semester,” she says, turning away from me to stare out the windshield at passing cars. “You drive too slow.”

  I cannot believe that my sweet baby sister just asked me that question, then changed the subject like it was nothing. Is she already at the age where she’s thinking about that kind of stuff?

  “Sex is a very serious thing,” I say, trying to be the responsible big brother despite the fact that I was in a casual relationship with Freya for a long while. Do as I say, not as I do, and all that. “You know that, right?”

  She nods and huffs, clearly already over this conversation. Now, though, I’m wondering why she brought it up.

  “Why do you ask?” My hands clench tightly on the wheel.

  She shrugs, avoiding looking at me. This really feels like a conversation for her to have with our parents, but that’s also an embarrassing thing to ask your mom and dad about.

  “Why are you asking about sex?” I push one last time. If she doesn’t answer again, I’ll drop it for now.

  She sighs. “Gemma says that she had sex with Phillip.”

  I raise my eyebrows. The two pups she mentioned aren’t even fifteen yet. There are six pups in the twelve-to-fourteen group, and the knowledge that some of them are already having sex is unpleasant at best.

  “And how do you feel about that?” I ask, already horribly uncomfortable with this conversation. It seems like Lydia wants to talk about it for a reason, though, and I’d rather her speak with an adult wh
o can clear things up than another pup who doesn’t know shit.

  She shrugs, but her face is turning red with embarrassment.

  I consider my next words very carefully. “Do you…like…one of them?”

  Her eyes dart to mine, but she doesn’t deny it.

  Ah.

  Being a preteen is hard. With everything else that happened when I was that age, it’s hard to recall all the regular middle-school-aged angst. I’m not really sure what to tell her, though. I didn’t lose my own virginity until I was almost twenty.

  “It’s hard being your age,” I finally say. “But I can tell you that it gets a bit easier.” I’m not sure if that will help, and she wraps her arms around herself as I take the exit off the interstate. We’re just getting ice cream from the truck-stop McDonald’s, so I park in the lot instead of going to the drive-through.

  “Phillip asked me to send him nudes,” she says. “And I didn’t want to. Literally two days later, Gemma told me they had sex.”

  Jesus Christ. “I’m gonna be honest, Lydia,” I say, twisting in my seat to face her. “Teenage boys suck. Like, they’re the absolute worst.”

  She looks at me with surprise. “But you were a teenage boy.”

  I nod very seriously. “And that’s how I know that they suck. Because I was one. I used to be awful, too, you know.”

  She smiles a little. “Is this just a ‘boys stink and stay away from them’ lecture?”

  I shake my head. “No, although I guess sort of. My main point is…” What is my point? I want my sister to feel better, but this is way outside of what I was prepared for today. She’s my tiny baby sister. She shouldn’t be thinking about sex or getting pressured into nudes by boys her age. I can remember holding her for the first time like it was yesterday. “You don’t have to do anything you’re uncomfortable with. If Phillip is so much of a dick that he won’t like you just because you won’t send nudes, he’s not worth your time. And I might beat the shit out of him.”