Chapter 1 #2
“You were busy, sir.”
“Yes,” I admit. “I was.”
I am always busy. That’s why I don’t have anything resembling a mate.
I’ve taken lovers from time to time, but none of them have had any fated energy.
The connection between an alpha and his mate is sacred and urgent and cannot be denied.
I’ve never experienced that, and I am starting to wonder if I never will.
Not everybody meets their fated mate. Not everybody gets to experience the world through a devoted lover’s eyes. I might, eventually, if I must, settle for a suitable female instead. It would be best to continue the bloodline. Not doing so leaves the pack open to power struggles.
I’ve met a few pleasant, smart, and beautiful female shifters recently, all potential candidates for the role, but none of them are the one. I know that, and the fact is, they know it too. They have the mates made for them, and to take one of them would be to deny them that.
It’s complicated. It’s time consuming. And it means I really don’t have time for a pack of upstart wolf brats refusing hundreds of thousand dollars to fall in line.
“I’m going to go and handle this in person,” I tell him. “I assume they have a physical location? They’re not all online in their various bedrooms?”
He clears his throat again. “They do have a physical location,” he says. “One you are familiar with.”
“Where are they?” My tone is short, made shorter by the fact he is making me ask the same question twice. The new suit is starting to feel remarkably small as my body starts the preamble to shifting.
I hear Fescue make a strangled sound of annoyance.
“If I’ve asked him once, I’ve asked him a thousand times to take off his jacket before he comes over all alpha,” I hear him say to the unfortunate tailor.
I turn my attention back to the call, where my associate has finally decided to stop stuttering and just spit it out. “They’re actually in the old warehouse.”
My brows very nearly hit my fucking hairline. “Excuse me?” My voice is quiet and dangerous.
“I doubt they realize the significance of the building, sir. I think it was a matter of opportunistic…”
“I have to go,” I say, ending the call.
These little shits have decided to try to take over some of my territory using my birthplace as a staging ground. The fucking nerve is unbelievable, and will not go unpunished.
Unlike Chase, I do not believe this is an accident. I think they chose the location on purpose to bait me. Unfortunately for them, it took much longer than they imagined for me to be baited.
I get in my car alone, and drive to the warehouse. I usually travel with more of the pack, but most of the pack is still at the retreat. My higher management team members are reliable and deserve their time off. I did not imagine I’d have to call them in for something like this.
* * *
I used to live in the roughest, poorest, most industrial part of the city.
My childhood took place between discarded tires and broken windows.
My father worked on the docks and oversaw the pack as a whole.
My mother tended the pack’s pups. I was their sole child, due to an injury sustained during birth.
They are both passed now. My father in a shipping accident when I was fifteen years old, my mother not long later. There was nothing medically wrong with her. She simply faded away on herself. A broken fated mate bond is often fatal.
I did not want to come back here. As soon as I could, as soon as we started having the money to do it, I got myself and the pack as far from this neighborhood as possible. Ironic that I feel territorial now.
But there are worse things to come. As I turn down long familiar streets, I notice that changes have been happening.
I heard about this, I suppose. I was told that the demographics were shifting.
Some gentrification was mentioned. I didn’t pay attention.
I had other things to think about, and I made sure I was not thinking of anything else.
I pull up at the address, but the old building does not look like it used to. When I was born here it was already in decay. The efforts to tidy it up were constant and ill-fated.
I park in front of a freshly renovated warehouse. The old rotten panels have been replaced with yellow metal. It looks Bauhaus in design and cheerful. There’s yellow, red, blue, and the black lines of the steel frame outline the various sections. A big sign over the door says Runaways.
The last time I was here, this was a rundown building with more than half the windows broken, completely infested with rats, and sometimes people who took refuge to do drugs along with the trash they brought and left.
I remember leaving with a sense of disgust, and a faint idea about having the whole thing bulldozed. Never acted on it, of course.
Now the building has been broken up into office spaces and contains three levels. There’s a ground floor where people seem to congregate in a loose office sense. I walk up the stairs in the middle of the building, to find the second floor, which is full of art and computers and I suppose stock.
It’s the third floor I’m looking for. More of a loft office than a full floor.
It’s set into the apex of the roof, and commands a view out over the industrial city as a whole.
I’m impressed. There’s a few dozen young people milling about, paying me absolutely attention at all.
I move through this place like a ghost. It’s an interesting feeling.
I can scent the pack nature of those here.
A lot of shifters going about their business, happy, relaxed.
There’s a chaotic energy in some places.
Some of the young guys are wrestling in the corners, and I can hear video games being played in back rooms. All in all, though, I’m impressed with them, and not very impressed with our own monitoring.
“Can I help you?”
I am finally acknowledged by a young woman with pink hair who is sitting at a desk near the top of the stairs. She has a phone in front of her, which she taps through while she is waiting for me to respond. Less than a second was still too long for her. Understandable.
Tinny music escapes through speakers as she glances down at the media that has just popped up. I can’t see what it is. I don’t care to know either.
“Where is Nick Love?”
“Nicky isn’t taking visitors today,” she says.
Her attention has now been entirely captured by the phone.
She could not care less about me. This is a strange experience.
I am used to a certain level of deference from shifters, especially young ones.
This lot have not been taught anything about proper manners, it seems.
“The hell he isn’t. I own this building.”
That is true. I do own this building. I have no idea how so much work was done on it without anybody mentioning it to me, but I suppose tradesmen don’t usually ask for proof of property ownership.
They do what they’re paid to do, because people don’t usually do upgrades on buildings they don’t own.
Everything about this situation is incredibly odd.
The secretary gives me a brutally effective Gen Z stare. I feel myself being shrunk down to irrelevance as I stand here getting practically no response at all.
“Okay,” she says, her voice a monotonous drawl, unimpressed, unstressed, and uninterested.
I growl inwardly. This little pack is out of control.
I could handle the secretary brat, but she’s not on my list of people to deal with.
I’ll get one of my lieutenants to take care of her at some point.
Every single one of these little upstart whelps is going to have to be taught how to behave properly.
With her disinterest registered, I decide to just go ahead and go in. I am curious as to how Nick, or apparently, Nicky Love manages to run a pack when everybody in it is so absolutely badly behaved.
I wait for the secretary to hit me with the ‘you can’t go in there’ line, but she doesn’t bother.
She goes back to her phone without even bothering to shrug.
The fact that Nick Love’s main line of corporate defense is a young woman who doesn’t care who walks through to see him is an indication the resistance I have been expecting from him won’t materialize.
I walk into the main office. A room like this could be a very impressive large office space, but for the great deal of storage, shelving, and general stuff about the place that makes it seem smaller than it is.
The closest approximation to anything I have seen like this before is the backroom at a bar, crossed with the offices of a tech startup that aims to ‘disrupt,’ which in my experience means burn investor capital and then go belly up.
The walls are very pink, for starters. Someone has painted cartoon wolves in the style of a heavily copyrighted cartoon cat all over the walls. There’s a rack of clothes on one wall, bright and fashionable, I’m sure.
The other wall is full of old arcade machines, and newer tech I don’t recognize.
There’s a wall full of headsets of the kind that go over your eyes.
Some of Fescue’s nephews tried to get me to play a game on one of those years ago.
I fell over and they spent the rest of the vacation laughing about it.
Little shits. One of them is a surgeon now.
Anyway. I’m not here to spontaneously reminisce about my family. I’m here to crush opposition.
This isn’t the office of a man who will be traditional competition. This is the office of a…
“I swear to fucking god, I thought it was here, but we’ve been storing all these boxes according to rainbow colors, not according to contents, and I’m gonna be honest with you, Zee.
That might have been a mistake. Also, I found a pink one that just has a hundred pieces of gum in it.
And then there was another pink one with a gun in it. That’s too confusing…”