Nine #3
“No,” Cole told him. “I was ready to honor the line of succession, to support your place as heir, to support you as alpha after your father. I didn’t want to cause any of you a moment of pain, even after several members of the pack came to me and said I needed to challenge you,” he whispered, his eyes on Abel.
“I appreciated you all so much for taking Evan and me in after our father died in a car accident.”
Abel began pacing.
“But now I know you had my father killed,” Cole said icily. “That’s probably the real reason you moved here, isn’t it? You had to get away from the Haviland Pack because you’ve been paying them back for years for what they did for you.”
Abel was shaking now, still pacing back and forth. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, and I will not have—”
“Enough.” Cole took a deep breath. “I hereby challenge you for your place as alpha. We will meet on Thursday before the feast.”
All eyes were suddenly on me.
“Merritt will not interfere, but he will stand at my side.” Cole turned to look at me. “Won’t you?”
“I will,” I rasped, thinking that I’d only just found him, and now I was supposed to stand there and watch and do nothing?
While I knew logically that there was no way a second-born wolf could best the firstborn son of an alpha, and that Cole was the one who should, by rights, be alpha…
anything could happen. I’d seen things I’d never anticipated over the long years of my life.
“I request that the challenge not be to the death, but until one of us yields, and if I win, all three of you will be banned from the pack and pack land. The same will be true of Evan and me. If I lose, we will leave the pack.”
“I don’t want any of that!” Abel yelled at him.
“Well, you should have thought of that before you had my father killed!” Cole shouted back.
It was suddenly quiet in the house, the crackling of the fire the only sound.
“The Danton-Steelwater Pack will be here from Morgantown to join us for the feast and a run,” Abel explained. “The alpha’s name is Spencer Danton. He can judge the challenge. I’ll let him know. I’m sure he’ll be all the more eager to join us for your insisted-upon blood sport.”
“It’s not sport, it’s to correct who leads the pack. I put this off too long. Even if there had been no foul play, I couldn’t, in good conscience, not take my place as alpha. My father would have been so disappointed that I’d turned my back on my birthright.”
They probably would have left then, seeing as there was nothing more to say, but Justin moved to stand in front of me.
He was trying to intimidate me, which I wanted to tell him would have been a neat trick if many others both stronger and scarier had not tried in the past. I had even annoyed the god Lugh at one point, and he could have erased me from both existence and time.
Justin Swann being upset with me was doing nothing for me at all.
“You took my power. We need it to grow our pack.” He spoke softly, but I could hear the anger and venom in his voice. “I thought maybe I was wrong and it would all be back to normal this morning, but it wasn’t.”
“No. You used your power not for good, not because you wanted the best for everyone, but solely for the benefit of yourself and your alpha. I could not, in good conscience, allow that to continue.”
“I used it to increase the numbers in the pack.”
“Which Anson did not think was necessary,” I reminded him.
“Like most good alphas, he showed everyone the care and kindness, protection and shelter that pack members should have received by belonging to him. Unfortunately, that understanding was lost on your own father, as he was not an alpha. And now Cole will take back the pack that is rightfully his, and you, Justin, have no need for a power that, again, should only have been used for good.”
“And if I kill you, will my power return?”
I shook my head. “It’s returned to where it came from. Waiting, I’m sure, to imbue someone more worthy.”
“Maybe I’ll test your theory, Merritt,” he yelled, and only then did I see that he had a knife in his hand.
“Won’t he just pass—yeah, that’s what I thought,” Cole said, and we all watched his cousin crumple to the ground in a heap.
The moment he’d threatened me, and had meant it in his heart, down he went, out cold.
As there was nothing more to say after that, Abel picked up his son and left, with Narah walking out behind them.
Of course, Justin would wake up as soon as they were off my land, but Cole made sure to follow them to the door and close it behind them.
When he turned to me, I saw the uncertainty on his face.
It was one thing to know what you had to do, another entirely to arrive at the moment and jump.
There was also the realization that the family he’d thought he had was gone.
“Come here,” I whispered, gesturing him over to me.
He rushed across the room and wrapped me in his arms, pressing his face into my shoulder. The sudden sobbing was not a surprise.
“Listen to me,” I whispered. “I will be your family, starting now. I will be Evan’s as well. I will always be here for both of you, and I won’t ever leave you.”
He gasped for air and squeezed me tighter. I was honored to be his rock in the storm.