Honor looked over the notes for this week and grimaced. The chores and bills weren’t onerous by any means, but she just didn’t want to deal with them, especially not since she’d already taken care of everything that could possibly be handled away from the pack’s grounds. The business had been her father’s passion, not hers, and the cabins they rented to pack members and vacationing Others, along with the commercial properties in town, struck her more as a burden than a vocation. If she had her druthers, she’d be spending her time at a pottery wheel, or hiking through the woods, not cooped up behind a computer. It was just one more sign to her that the life she’d ended up with was not the life she would have chosen for herself.
She looked around the office to be sure no one lurked in the corners, waiting to demand a moment of her time; and she knew it was ridiculous, but she still took the precaution of closing the door and pulling down the shades before she gave in to her desire to lay her head down on the cool wooden surface and close her eyes.
What had she gotten herself into, and why the hell was she now exerting every last ounce of her considerable will and rapidly depleting energy to secure for herself a position she had never even wanted?
Intellectually, she had known this day was coming, the day when she would have to take over the pack, but she’d had no idea it would be this soon. She had thought she had years yet, maybe a decade or two, before she’d have to think of a way to tell her father she didn’t want to take his place when he died. But before she could get the words out, he’d been gone, leaving her with a mass of problems and no conceivable way out of them. He had trapped her in the surest way possible, with her own desire to please him.
Maybe if she had ever succeeded in doing that, she wouldn’t despise herself for what the attempt had stolen from her.
When she’d been a child, all the way up through her teenaged years, Honor had longed to please her demanding father. She’d done everything she could to get his attention. She’d tried being the obedient daughter, but he barely noticed. Then she’d tried being the top student in her classes, but that failed as well. Nothing had made any impact on Ethan Tate, not when she excelled and not when she rebelled. Nothing had seemed to make any difference to him until she’d begun to move up in the pack.
Her first challenge had been more of a lark than anything intentional. She’d refused to follow the orders of a slightly older male pack member—not surprising since he’d been trying to order her to let him grope her newly developed breasts—and had been faced with the decision to either challenge him for his rank or follow his orders. Honor had gone with the challenge. She had won, leaving the fight slightly bloody, but satisfied that the boy she’d beaten wouldn’t be giving her any more grief anytime soon.
That first challenge had earned her barely a passing glance, but the next one had merited a raised eyebrow. The next, a pat on the back. By the time she’d won her first challenge against an adult pack member, the day after her fourteenth birthday, she had found the path to her father’s approval—straight through his ego. Every time she won a rank challenge, it reflected well on her father and on the line of Lupines from whom she and he were descended. That was the only act he respected and so Honor had fought the battle over and over until finally it had won her a place at his side, but it had never won her his love.
Honestly, she wasn’t even sure anymore whether he’d ever had any to give her. She’d known from her earliest memories that he would have preferred if she’d been a boy—the son he’d always wanted. She had even wondered for a while—especially when he’d tried to appoint other young males to take her uncle’s place as beta after the accident that had killed both Joseph and his mate, Marie—whether he might literally try to replace her by adopting a young male pack member as his foster son, but she needn’t have worried. Ethan Tate had had too much stubborn pride in his name and his heritage to take that route. “Tates rule the White Paw,” he had told her so many times she occasionally heard the words in her sleep. In Ethan’s mind, anything else was unthinkable.
That was the real reason why he’d eventually given in and accepted her challenge wins as proof of her ability to be his beta. Only she knew how close he had come to killing her instead. Only she knew that when he’d had her wolf bloodied and pinned to the ground of the challenge circle, she had prevented him from ripping out her throat by telepathically reminding him that if he killed her, she would never be able to have pups; and if she never had pups, there would be no chance that a grandson of his blood would be born to carry on Ethan’s legacy.
She had learned at fifteen that the only value she had to her father was as a means of ensuring his immortality. She’d never forgotten the lesson, but her greatest regret was that she’d never mustered up the nerve to tell him to take his pack and shove it. Until his dying day, she’d remained at his side, ruling the White Paw Clan as if she relished each moment.
It hadn’t taken her very long as beta before she realized how unhappy the title made her. While she now received her father’s attention, and even his grudging approval, there was none of the affection she had craved. Maybe if her elevation in the hierarchy had earned her what she’d struggled for so long to achieve, it would have made a difference in the way she viewed the job, but as it was, she had no love for the chores that accompanied the position. She took no joy in settling disputes between rivals, nor in enforcing the laws of her father’s rule. Obviously, she had the ability to do the job and had gained the respect of the pack, but she got no pleasure from it. She didn’t relish the power of her station, just lived with it.
Not that she wanted to be omega by any means. She couldn’t imagine being the lowest rung in the pack hierarchy, nor even being lost in the middle with the majority of members. She didn’t want to drop in rank, she just wanted to not have so much of the responsibility that went with being in charge. And that really wasn’t one of her options. So now look at her. Probably the world’s only reluctant alpha, and who was currently engaged in an entrenched battle for her position.
Honor groaned and raised her head from the desk just far enough to prop it up in her hands. Viewed through clear eyes, her future stretched before her like a trap. The longer she spent here, doing the things that made her unhappy, the tougher it would be to ever get herself out of it. The more the pack accepted her, the less chance she had to leave. The harder she fought to prove herself to her followers, to Logan Hunter, and to the Silverback Clan, the deeper she dug her own grave. If she won the battle with her mate, the man she had argued with so passionately to acknowledge her claim and leave her in peace, she condemned herself to a life she hated with every fiber of her being.
So here she was, stuck in a place she didn’t want to be, doing something she didn’t want to do, and telling everyone who tried to talk her out of it to take a flying leap. Not to mention maiming anyone who tried to force her out of the martyrdom she’d stepped into. Sure, that was sane.
If things had been different, the easiest way out would have been to just lose a challenge. It happened to most Lupines at some point. She could throw a rank challenge and let one of the members of her pack take over her position as leader of the White Paw Clan. The plan had a few disadvantages, though, chief among them, the inability to control whether or not her opponent would let her live after the challenge. Traditionally, alpha challenges ended in death, and just because she had been lenient with her challengers did not mean that anyone else would offer her the same option. The second problem had to do with the fact that she could see no current member of the pack who was capable of taking on the role of alpha with any success. No one else had any experience or even enough good common sense to make a decent showing. Just look at who had challenged her so far—a whelp, a wuss, and a would-have-been friend. None of them had had the strength to beat her, and none of the ones still making noises did, either. Like Darin Major. Hell, his main claim to fame was that he ranked as the biggest asshole between here and Bangor. He talked a good game, but the w
ord “blowhard” had been invented to describe him. The only thing Honor would have to worry about from him would be the very real chance that he would try to cheat his way to a challenge victory. Since she’d be expecting it, though, not even that would get him the win. She’d still take him down, and for the first time, she might just be able to stomach the thought of ripping the throat out of her challenger. Darin really was just that offensive.
She sighed and tried to figure out a way to reframe the idea that she led a pack full of nonentities without making herself sound like the world’s biggest snob, and there really wasn’t one. It wasn’t that she believed every single one of her pack members was an idiot, just that none of them would be able to step into her shoes without disrupting the life of the pack to a fairly significant degree. While Honor had been trained for her current position since the age of fifteen, no one else had. It might be a harsh truth, but it was still the truth.
Honor had a vision. She had plans for how she wanted to see the pack join the twenty-first century. She wanted to see them integrating with the modern world, becoming familiar with technology and engineering and science and all the fields that made humans such a threat to the continued survival of the human species. Only by understanding how the human world worked could the Lupines hope to survive the ever-growing encroachment into their territory, but so few pack members had even begun to comprehend that. Most of them had gone reactionary and preached a policy of isolation, cutting the Lupine world completely off from the human one. They saw it as the only way to preserve their culture. Honor saw it as suicide.
The more isolated they became, the more people would choose to isolate them. And that’s the sort of thing that led to witch trials and hangings and stonings and such things. Honor would prefer that the stonings did not happen, so the Lupines would need to learn to live with the humans and to accept that sometimes change became necessary. Already, their races were beginning to mingle, and she had heard rumors that the bigwigs across the country (especially the Council of Others in Manhattan) had begun to discuss plans for revealing the existence of their kind to the human world. It posed a big risk, but Honor saw the necessity behind it. It now felt almost inevitable, so why not work to ensure it happened on Lupine terms?
Honor just couldn’t risk allowing a new alpha to regress and take the pack with them. It wasn’t an option. If she had to fight to the death, turn her back on her mate, and go to war with the Silverback Clan to save her pack from a future of chaos and destruction, that was the only thing she could do. Her very genetic fiber had been programmed to leave her no other option. In spite of everything, she was still her father’s daughter.
The final reason why she couldn’t bring herself to lose any of her challenges didn’t exactly qualify as noble, but it was honest. Her pride wouldn’t allow it. Period. End of story. After all these years of proving herself to her father and the world, she simply couldn’t fathom the idea of losing a fight. It went against every fiber of her being. She fought to win, and to lose would not only be to lose her position—and potentially her life—it would be to lose face in front of the entire pack, in front of the entire Lupine world. If she did that, how would she ever be able to look at herself in the mirror again?
She couldn’t. Therefore, she couldn’t lose the battle.
“Welcome back to square one,” she muttered under her breath.
She also couldn’t afford the distraction presented by her Silverback guest.
Somewhere, she figured, the gods must be laughing at her. She couldn’t think of how she might have pissed them off, but that was the only possible explanation for why this was happening to her now. Why else throw a mating into the middle of the most complicated period of her life? Could they find worse timing? Not only did she not have the time for a mate, or the energy to dedicate to one, but how the hell was she supposed to stop fighting to save her pack so she could show her belly to the new dog sniffing around her?
How was she supposed to reconcile the fact that her predestined mate was also the one person who could destroy not just her, but her pack as well?
This just was not going to work. She knew that. It didn’t matter that the man made her heart race and her blood heat and her body clench. It didn’t matter that he left her with rapid breath and damp panties. She couldn’t have a mate right now, and she especially couldn’t have him.
The really inconvenient part, though, was that she didn’t think Logan had read that memo. He seemed determined to take what he wanted, when he wanted it, and damn the consequences. It was a pretty predictable Lupine response, especially coming from a man as dominant as Logan Hunter, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with, given their circumstances. Honor had a hard enough time keeping her own raging hormones under control, without having to deal with the source of those hormones doing his damnedest to incite further raging. It just wasn’t going to work.
Yeah, and if she kept telling that to herself often enough, she just might end up brain-damaged enough to believe it.
Swearing, Honor flipped her calendar open and began leafing through the pages once more. Time to stop brooding and concentrate on some real work. She got as far as opening to the proper page before a loud knock on her door called her attention.
“Come in,” she snarled.
She looked up to see a tousled brown head poking through the slightly open door. It wore Max’s puppy-dog expression and just below it dangled a bag containing the local bakery’s chocolate frosted doughnuts. “Is it safe?”
Honor checked the side of her mouth for drool. “It might be. Provided you throw those doughnuts in first.”
Theobromine be damned. She wanted those chocolate doughnuts. Besides, the amount of chocolate an adult werewolf would have to eat to get a bellyache from the toxic chemical defied comprehension. It defied Honor’s comprehension, at least. Chocolate was one of her biggest vices.
She caught the bag as it sailed toward her head and had swallowed half of the first doughnut before Max even managed to park his butt in the chair in front of her desk. She’d skipped lunch again to avoid running into Logan and skipping meals was not a good idea for a Lupine.
“So,” Max said, lounging back in his chair, one ankle crossed negligently over the other knee, “what’s up with the Silverback dude?”
Honor bit into doughnut number two and felt her eyes narrow. She barely forced herself to chew before she replied. “What do you mean, ‘What’s up’? He’s here because his alpha sent him here. You were at dinner last night. You heard what I said.”
“Well, duh, but despite all rumors to the contrary, I am not, in fact, either a clueless pup or a babbling idiot. You told everyone that he came to pay his respects at the passing of the alpha, but if that was all this was about, why would he be poking his nose into everyone’s business and asking questions about how the pack operates? What’s he trying to find out? And don’t tell me he’s on vacation, or something. That would hold about as much water as calling it a courtesy visit. Dude is damned sure asking way too many questions for courtesy.”
The younger werewolf met Honor’s gaze with raised eyebrows, his foot bouncing up and down where it dangled off the edge of his knee. At twenty, Max had energy to burn and yet was in that awkward stage between adult, when he would take his final place in the pack hierarchy, and child, when he could run around the territory free of responsibilities. She would need to find a constructive way to use all that energy, especially since her instincts told her that she was looking at a very high-ranking future wolf, potentially even her next beta. But right now, other priorities occupied her mind.
“Asking questions?” Her stomach clenched. She had known that was what Logan must be planning, but it still galled her to hear about him doing it. “Asking who? And what does he want to know?”
“It’s not polite to answer a question with a question.”
“It isn’t when you do it but I’m the alpha. I don’t have to be polite.”
“That is
so not fair.”
“Deal.” She snagged a third doughnut and used it to punctuate her point. “Now tell me. Where is the Silverback poking his nose, and what has he been asking about?”
“Everywhere and lots of things.” The sneakered foot bounced, and Honor chewed in an attempt to keep her mouth too occupied to betray the true extent of her interest. “He’s talked to a good sampling of the present pack. Elders, males, females. He even visited Molly Stevens’s day care and talked to some of the little ones. Whatever he wants to know, he wants a pretty diverse perspective on it.”
“Have you asked any of the people he talked to what he wanted?”
“Well. No.”
“So, in other words, you have no idea what I’m asking you.”
“You could say that.”
“I just did.”
“True. But you could also say that you just didn’t ask the right question.”
Honor growled. “Max…”
“Hey, all I’m saying is, I don’t know exactly what he’s been asking people about, but I do know that there are some rumors flying around that something big is going to be happening at the Howl this weekend.” He leaned forward in his chair, blue eyes glowing. “Something bigger than an alpha declaration and a challenge or two.”
That made Honor pause. “What does that mean? What’s bigger? And just what challenges are you talking about?”
“Don’t try to distract me, Honor. We both know exactly what males in this pack are still dumb enough to want to challenge you to be alpha. You won’t change the subject with that. And if I knew what was bigger than the asskickings you’ll be handing out on Saturday, I’d know what the Silverback was asking people about. Which I clearly don’t.”
“Don’t be smart with me, Maxwell Clarke.”
He held up his hands. “I’m not being smart, Honor. I promise. I mean, I’m just as curious as you are. If something big is going down, it would sure be nice to be prepared for it.”
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