Mave Fortune (Blackstone Academy #1)
PROLOGUE
June
“I, Jack Fortune, hereby renounce my claim as an Alpha Heir. I withdraw my family’s membership in the South Utah Pack and will leave Pack lands as soon as possible after tonight."
My father’s voice was strong, clear, and devoid of any real emotion.
He stood in the center of the Pack meeting hall—a converted wilderness lodge that once housed hunting parties and the occasional redneck wedding.
The Pack Alpha—my grandfather—sat at the center of a long table, raised on a dais so that he could lord over the rest of the Pack during gatherings.
My uncles and a few older cousins, the Pack betas, sat fanned out on either side of him, most staring at my dad with thinly-veiled dislike.
I sat with the rest of my family behind my father at one of the many tables scattered around the hall.
My mother looked on nervously while my brother Ben appeared to be fucking around on his phone paying attention to none of this, as if we were lounging on the couch at home and not standing in front of Pack leadership making the biggest announcement of our lives.
"I hope you’ve really thought this through, Jack," my grandfather stated coldly. "If you leave this pack, you will not be welcomed back. You will no longer be considered one of my heirs. I’ll have nothing to do with you or your family."
"It is what I want, Father," Dad replied. "You are well aware that I’ve never had any interest in leadership or becoming Alpha. I’m happy with my career in technology, and I feel that my leaving will alleviate any tension or question about future succession to Alpha and the direction of Pack leadership. "
My dad was being super diplomatic about all of this and wisely playing to the insecurities of his eldest brother, Evan.
Evan thought he was the Moon-anointed successor to my grandfather as Alpha, and he would have been happy to carry on the oppressive, patriarchal values of the South Utah Pack.
He was absolutely who my grandfather would choose to lead, and he had been groomed since birth to take over.
What everyone knew, but were too afraid to say out loud, was that my dad was the stronger Alpha and would’ve won a challenge against Evan or any of my other uncles should he have the desire to run the Pack.
It was getting to the point that no matter how much he insisted that he didn’t want it, he was starting to worry that we wouldn’t be safe if his family members ever banded together to ensure he never got the itch to attempt a takeover.
No one rivaled him in the amount of Alpha power he and his wolf had, but that wouldn’t save him against an underhanded attack by six other wolves.
So here we sat on a muggy June evening in a mostly empty Pack meeting hall, renouncing our place in the Pack to its leadership and preparing to move halfway across the country to Louisiana.
My dad had petitioned the Alpha of the large Northwest Louisiana Pack for membership, and he’d granted our request under one condition: we were to join as omega wolves—the lowest ranking members of the Pack.
Dad was to keep his Alpha lineage and power to himself while making a quiet life for his family in Shreveport.
No Alpha, even one that ruled a pack as large and powerful as the Northwest Louisiana Pack, wanted another pack’s Alpha heir to show up and disrupt pack leadership or even give the illusion of a viable alternative leader. This one had drawn a hard line.
Dad, not giving a shit about pack leadership or politics, had readily agreed, gotten a job as the head of IT at a start-up company that worked in the town’s burgeoning film scene, and requested this meeting to renounce our place in the South Utah Pack so we could get the fuck out of town.
"It is probably for the best, then," my grandfather said.
"You never did embrace the values of this Pack.
Never cared about the family. You spent all your time with your nose in your computer or traveling to Salt Lake City to hobnob with your human employers.
" He huffed, and glanced over at our table.
"You let your kids run around practically feral, sending them to human schools, discouraging socialization with wolves their own age. Disgraceful."
My uncles and cousins tittered up on the dais, mumbling words of agreement, like a bunch of pious pricks.
I glanced down at my ripped acid-washed skinny jeans, fitted purple tank top, and ratty black Converse low tops.
I was pretty feral by the Pack’s standards, seeing as how Modesty 101 was their preferred curriculum for the Pack females.
Ben, clothed in his preferred crisp dark blue jeans and fitted baby blue polo shirt that accentuated his muscled build, smirked and mouthed “You fucking heathen,” at me before returning to scrolling thirst trap pictures on Instagram (probably).
"I’m sure, then, that there will be no trouble with us finding a new pack elsewhere that tolerates our family’s eccentricities," my dad stated curtly. "So we will head home so that we can be prepared to be on the road tomorrow. Thank you for understanding, Father."
We couldn’t have filed out faster than we did then.
My dad draped his burley arm over my mom’s dainty shoulders and lead her out the front doors to our family’s dusty white Tahoe.
Ben and I jumped in the back seat, and we all sat silently as my dad drove us down the gravel road that lead to the front gates of the Pack’s territory, then out onto the country road that lead us to the nearby town where we had a small but modern townhouse close to the tiny downtown square.
The town was clean and quaint, and it had been my home for nineteen years.
I wasn’t going to miss it even a little bit.
"Dad! I can’t find my laptop charger; did you borrow it?
" Ben’s voice echoed down the stairs as he thrashed around in his bedroom, which was full of boxes and piles of shit that needed to be packed before 7:00 a.m. tomorrow when the moving truck would arrive to haul our life to Shreveport, Louisiana.
Having packed my shit days ago, I was lounging downstairs in the family room on our giant leather sectional couch, scrolling through pictures of the Berkeley campus and daydreaming about normal college life away from the wolf pack.
My parents were lazing next to me, quietly discussing moving logistics and getting each other psyched up about their new jobs at Red River Productions.
Dad had parlayed his tech job in Salt Lake City into an awesome position at RRP, and Mom was joining as his assistant, which she’d been acting as for years while he worked from home.
Now she was at least getting paid to do it.
"I don’t need your janky laptop cord, Benjamin!" my dad hollered toward the stairs. He looked at mom and me. "He’ll be looking for that for the next two hours. He’s never going to get it all done by the time the movers get here."
"I don’t know why you thought otherwise, Old Man," I scoffed. "Ben looks so put together, but he’s really an unorganized hot mess who has way too much shit. I already sent in an application for him to be on Hoarders but they didn’t bite."
"How are you really feeling about this, Mave?" Mom asked me, changing the subject and looking worried. "I know none of us have any love lost for this Pack’s way of life, but starting at a new school in a new town for your senior year is still a scary thing for any teenager, wolf or not."
I smiled at her. My mom was the best. She gave Ben and me as much freedom as she could stand to allow so we could learn who we are as individuals and as wolves, all while offering unwavering support, help when we needed it without judgement, and on the bad days, a shoulder to cry on.
How this Pack hadn’t sucked the life out of her by now, I’ll never know.
"I’m looking forward to it, Mom, really," I replied. "I know that despite what Dad said at the meeting, you guys are really doing this for Ben and me. I can handle the new girl jitters at this fancy Pack-endorsed prep school if it means we can all finally breathe a little bit. Especially Ben."
She and Dad nodded at me, both looking like my answer had eased their anxiety about uprooting us at this time in our lives.
I was starting my senior year and Ben his junior year.
We’d been faring okay at the small human high school in our town, but the Pack’s looming presence in our lives had gone on long enough.
The South Utah Pack was a small wolf-shifter pack that included any wolf that lived in the Southwest corner of Utah.
My dad’s family had been the Pack Alphas for five generations, and they ran a tight ship that embraced old school, traditional patriarchal values.
Other packs had long started allowing female shifters to beta for the packs if they showed strength or were blessed with some amount of Alpha power, but our Pack thought females were for breeding and running the home only.
Most kids were homeschooled in small groups on Pack territory, and little girls were never taught that they could choose a path beyond mating with the strongest male that would have them and giving him children.
My parents wanted me as far away from that bullshit as possible.
I had always been a bit strong-willed, but it had become increasingly apparent, after I hit puberty and shifted for the first time into the largest female wolf the Pack had seen in recent memory, that I was brimming with Alpha power that the Pack leadership would try to stamp out of me if they ever caught wind of its true magnitude.