PROLOGUE #2
Like my dad, I had no interest in exercising power of any sort in the Pack hierarchy, but I didn’t want to live my life in a constant shadow of fear that the Pack would find me out and get hostile about it.
Luckily innate Alpha power can’t be sensed by other wolves unless it is purposefully exercised by the wolf who was blessed with it, so I made sure never to flex in front of anyone in the Pack.
While I could’ve dealt with all of that and toed the line until I was able to graduate and get the fuck out to college paradise on the West Coast, I wasn’t going to play around with Ben’s happiness or safety.
He came out to us when he was thirteen, and if there was one thing our pack frowned upon more than an uppity female, it was homosexuality.
Now that Ben was seventeen and had developed a rotating lineup of human Tinder "dates" from neighboring towns that he snuck off with on occasion, we all wanted him to have the freedom to be himself without having to hide who he is from the Pack.
It didn’t matter that Ben was almost as strong with Alpha power as I was—the Pack would’ve found a way to shame him, shun him, and make him an outcast for the crime of simply preferring not to mate a female and keep her impregnated for as many years as possible.
In fact, one of the reasons my dad had chosen to petition the Northwest Louisiana Pack for admission was that one of the Pack’s top betas was not only a woman, but it was well known that she was mated to another woman.
I think my parents believed that by choosing to live our lives as separate from the Pack as possible, we would be able to do our own thing and just exist casually alongside it without getting involved.
My dad had escaped to college at Caltech, which was pretty rare for wolves, who tended to need to stick near their packs to feel settled.
My grandfather had nearly disowned him then, but Dad convinced him that his computer engineering degree would benefit the Pack, as he could come back and be the Pack’s IT guy.
It had worked, but it meant that my dad owed the Pack a debt since Grandfather helped finance his degree, and this had kept us connected to the Pack and its politics all these years.
Since the Pack was run by our family members, they inserted themselves into our lives as much as possible, and our town was just not big enough for us to avoid running into Pack members on almost a daily basis.
My grandmother and aunts had the tendency to drop by our house unannounced or ambush my mom and me at mandatory Pack events to either comment on my attire ("Mave, only gypsies and prostitutes have that many piercings in their ears!
"), or worse, try to set me up with some middling Pack male and lament the rapidly approaching waning of my fertility.
Ben was thrust at the prim buttoned-up Pack girls so often that he started a rumor at the last Pack holiday party that he was battling "just a light case of the clap" so they would all run in the other direction.
Needless to say, we were all ready for a change, and we were hoping that joining the giant Northwest Louisiana Pack would offer us some anonymity and freedom to just live our lives.
"So, Magic, do you think I’m a terrible person for not saying goodbye to Antonio?" Ben asked me as he pulled our black Tesla Model 3 onto I-40 in Albuquerque.
Dad had been so excited when he received his starting bonus from RRP that he came home from one of his last trips to Salt Lake with this fancy electric car as a "happy moving" gift for Ben and me.
We stuck out like a sore thumb driving it around rural Utah, but it was a cool-as-shit car and neither of us cared.
We were following my parents in the Tahoe on our road trip to Shreveport. The moving truck was somewhere behind us, having long been left in our dust.
"Benji, you hooked up with Antonio like twice, and once was in the disgusting locker room at the high school," I responded and gave him some judgmental side-eye. "One, I can’t believe neither of you ended up with MRSA. Second, two hook-ups does not a commitment make. You don’t owe him anything."
He huffed. "It was three times, which was twice more than anyone else! I’m certain he was one blow job away from telling me he loved me." He reached over and smacked me on the arm.
“Ouch, you dickhead!"
"Come on, Mave. Just because you never went back for seconds with anyone. Don’t be jealous of our love."
I fiddled with my rose gold aviators and pushed a blonde hair that had escaped my Wonder Woman french braid behind my ear.
I certainly wasn’t jealous of Ben’s hookups.
I’d had a few of my own when I could find a human boy that could keep my attention for more than an hour, since I wasn’t touching any male wolf in our pack with a ten-foot pole.
My sexual encounters were few and far between, but a shifter’s libido was an animal in and of itself, and the beast had to be fed every once in a while or we really would go feral.
My few fumbles in the bedroom with human boys had been mediocre at best, but we can’t all be gold medalists in the sexual Olympics right out of the starting gate.
"Benji, I love you and fully support your need to slut around with every willing dong you can get your big wolfy hands on.
" He barked out a laugh and gave me his million-dollar smile, his perfectly styled blond hair flopping with the movement and his hazel eyes twinkling.
I continued, "Someday I will find my own Antonio to bang in a dirty locker room shower, and then like you, I’ll know I've finally found love. "
"I love you, too, Magic," he said, always using the nickname he'd called me since I was six years old.
He sobered a bit and peeked over at me from behind his stylish wayfarers.
"Thank you for championing this move. I know it benefits all of us, but I also know you really did it for me. You were always able to suffer in silence and just grin and bear it all. I wasn’t. I was suffocating."
"I know. I’d do anything for you, Benji.
" I smiled at him, my own hazel eyes glassy with tears that occasionally lurked there but that I would never let fall.
Having grown up in a pack that insisted on females being weak, I spent a lot of time learning to avoid showing any kind of weakness in front of others, including crying.
"You think our stuffy new school is ready for the Fortune duo? The Stone Cold Queen and her Golden Knight?"
"Nah," I laughed. "Can’t let ’em know we’re really royalty, remember?"
"Ugh, no fun but what else is new," he pouted. "But I’m not worried. This omega wolf will win friends and pull boys with just my devastating good looks and lethal charm."
"I don’t doubt it, Benji. And I’ll just be lurking close by cheering you on, dreaming about Pepperdine or USD. Resting bitch face in full effect."
We drove for the next few hours in comfortable silence while the Tesla streamed whatever was Ben’s Spotify station du jour. We stopped for the night in Amarillo, and as my head hit the deflated motel pillow, the weight of what we’d done finally hit me.
We’d left our small wolf pack—the pack that our family has lead for generations—and were starting a new life as insignificant and hopefully mostly anonymous omega pack members in a giant regional pack.
My parents were going to start their dream jobs completely disconnected from pack politics, Ben was going to find a gorgeous wolf boyfriend that he could parade around town with no judgment or consequence, and I was going to be just one powerful female wolf in a pack with other powerful female wolves, where nobody would give a single shit about what I was wearing or why I wasn’t knocked up yet.
For the first time in many years, I fell asleep with a little smile on my face.