Chapter 16 Dakota
Dakota
“I’m taking this,” Prudence told me as she walked into my office carrying a huge gift basket.
I lifted a brow at her.
“Not the whole thing, just the champagne. Your dear alpha asked me to look into whether he could accept a gift from the high fae without there being strings attached. The only string is that I’m taking the champagne.”
I shrugged and waved at it, because I couldn’t have cared less about anything in a gift basket.
It would have been much more stressful if it had turned out we had to send it back and tell them no.
The high fae were a prickly lot, and turning down gifts, even ones that came with strings attached, was a questionable choice.
“Take the whole thing if you want. We just needed to be sure there were no issues.”
She grabbed the bottle in the center of the basket by the neck and came to sit in the chair across from me.
“I don’t really do that much aged cheese these days.
My doctor doesn’t like me eating such fatty foods.
So eat them now while you can!” She paused, looking at me for a moment.
“Though I suppose, being a wolf, that won’t be the same for you. ”
I had no rightful idea what older wolves could and couldn’t eat—the pack was strictly made up of wolves in a specific age range, since they’d all been late teenagers when they broke away from the Idaho pack, and hadn’t picked up a lot of new members along the way.
In fact, I was the youngest member of my pack by close to a decade, and no one was older than Jax, so it was a less than fifteen-year spread even with my inclusion.
“Now, what was it you wanted to see me about?” Prudence asked, just as Seth joined us, closing the door behind him. She turned to look at the staid security man, black T-shirt stretched tight across his enormous muscular chest, looking mildly surprised to see him.
I supposed Seth wasn’t the person she usually worked with even when she wasn’t there to see me.
“Jax is freaking out,” I explained, keeping my tone low, but not whispering, trying not to get too much attention from anyone not in my office.
The rooms were soundproofed, but we were werewolves, so that wasn’t always a perfect answer to privacy.
“Apparently Grant intends to challenge me, not him, and I need a fix for this. I asked you two to join me because I thought you were most likely to help me come up with an answer.”
The look that crossed Seth’s face, sheer disgust, as he dropped into the chair next to Prudence’s, gave me a moment’s concern.
I shouldn’t have worried, though. “Seriously? That old bit of bullshit? It’s the excuse a lot of old misogynistic assholes in charge of packs used for years to avoid accepting their mates as equals.
” He scrunched up his face and affected an even deeper voice than his already near-baritone.
“They’d be challenged for control of the pack if they’re equals. ”
Lovely. Why was I at all surprised that misogyny came into it? Sometimes it seemed to run all human and supernatural society.
Prudence didn’t look any happier. “And you can’t use magic if he does challenge you.”
Seth looked surprised at that, cocking his head in her direction. “Seriously? That doesn’t make any sense. He’s a mage. Why wouldn’t he use anything at his disposal?”
“There was a situation a few hundred years ago, where a wolf alpha took a mage for a mate, and started having his mate challenge all his rivals for control of their packs. He was trying to consolidate every pack in Europe under his rule, like he was a king rather than a pack leader. It was ingenious, if horrible.” She looked at least as disgusted as Seth at the notion, and I .
. . well, I couldn’t say much, since I’d initially been thinking I’d just set Grant on fire or something.
“So they changed pack law to stop him,” Seth said, sighing and rolling his eyes. “There’s always some asshole they’ve got to rewrite the rules for.”
Prudence nodded, setting the champagne bottle down next to herself and crossing her legs.
“I suspect that shortly, ‘that asshole’ is going to be Grant. Especially if he succeeds here. Taking over the Crescent pack would make him the richest werewolf in the world, and I don’t want to imagine what he’d do with that. ”
Seth shuddered, and it seemed more like a real gesture than the theatrical one it was when most people did it.
He would know how bad it would be firsthand, after all.
He knew Grant. “No one wants that. But Jax has a way around that part, at least. If he loses control of the pack, legally, he loses control of the company. And we’ve got contingencies.
If Jax loses control of the company, it immediately gets split between a handful of non-wolf employees who wouldn’t be answerable to wolf laws.
Our IT guy, Landon Smith, who’s a cat shifter.
Jax’s driver and bodyguard, Charles, a low fae.
The head of Research and Development, a coyote.
You, Ms. McCallan. We haven’t made it public because we don’t want anyone to panic, but Jax wasn’t leaving the company’s future to chance.
I think right now he’s trying to talk Jillian into renouncing the pack so that if the worst happens, she won’t have anything to do with it. ”
That explained why there had been occasional shouting everyone had heard through his office door that morning.
I understood why he was worried about it, but really, Jax was willfully misunderstanding his sister if he thought there was a chance in hell that she would ever walk away from the pack, let alone when we were all under threat.
Still, he was a good brother, so I wasn’t surprised he was trying it, even if it was doomed to fail. And also piss her off.
“Okay, so this is why I brought you two here. You know wolves and you know wolf law. We need to figure out how to keep this from even being a damn thing. If I have to fight Grant, then we’ve already lost. So how do I avoid that?”
Three weeks was a long damn time to wait, especially with Jax walking around looking like a ghost.
Jillian was constantly angry, and I couldn’t blame her. She shouldn’t have to put up with a threat of the people who’d made her childhood miserable, even if I was sure we were going to beat it.
If I had to break all laws in existence and just kill Grant myself, outside of any duel, and be ejected from the pack or even go on the run, I wasn’t going to allow the bastard to hurt my family.
But Prudence and Seth’s fix was so much simpler than that. So much easier and more elegant. I still wasn’t looking forward to what came after, but at least it was going to make it so Jax didn’t have to worry about me getting killed.
We met the Wildwood wolves in a pack-owned piece of land outside the city that we sometimes used for a “company retreat” on full moons, to shift and run and be the wolves we were on the inside.
My ancestor, whom Prudence and I had eventually determined to be my great-great-grandfather, was a bit snide about going to the woods to run like animals, but he seemed to realize that I needed him to leave me the fuck alone for this.
Bad enough I had a ghost barnacle attached to my soul at all, and Prudence was looking for ways to put him back to rest, but even he didn’t want to make me look like I was nuts, talking to thin air about how it was a damned bigot.
Family pride or something—I was his descendant, his namesake, and he didn’t want me to shame him any more than being a wolf already did.
There was a huge house on the land, with fifteen bedrooms and ten bathrooms sitting on a man-made lake, and unlike the house my family had lent us in Japan, this one was not cut off from the rest of the world.
It had full modern amenities, from electricity to super-fast internet to every streaming service that existed.
But we didn’t invite the Wildwood pack to the house. No, they were invited to an empty field on the other side of the lake from the house.
Most of our pack showed up in casual clothing, clearly ready for a fight, including Jax. Of course he was ready for a fight. He wanted a fight. He’d been itching for it, almost, since the meeting at the restaurant.
I suspected he wanted to fight the guy who’d warned me about Grant, but I could have told him that was a mistake. That guy? That guy was one of the best allies we had in the Idaho pack. He cared about Cash, and he’d warned us, so I hadn’t been blindsided by the whole idea of me being challenged.
He’d given me the opportunity to do what I did.
I showed up in a suit, completely unprepared for a fight.
If I hadn’t known the plan before, I’d have known it then, from the smug grin on Grant’s face as he watched me approach.
Jax looked a little confused and even more concerned, which was a little funny, because it was the same as the guy who’d warned me that I was the one about to field a challenge. But then, maybe that was the problem between them. They had too much in common, and not enough at the same time.
Instead of focusing on any of that, though, I ignored the Idaho pack. I looked straight at Jax, smiling at him as I walked up to stand before him, then right there in front of both packs, I rolled my neck all the way to the side, looking up at him with soft eyes.
As quietly as possible, I asked, “Where do you want me, Alpha?”
I watched Jax’s eyes dilate, and knew that in that moment, where he wanted me was on top of him.
Riding him into a mattress.
Beneath him, taking everything he had to give me.
Literally anywhere private, where I could swallow his cock down and he could watch me take every inch.
But that wasn’t the answer I needed in that moment.
Jax, who’d always been just the man to rise to every occasion, immediately figured out what to do.
He reached up and clasped a hand over my exposed neck, using the grip to guide me to his left side, between himself and Seth, just slightly behind the two of us.
Was anyone in my pack buying that I was submissive to Jax? Not even a little. Even Jax knew damn well that I was the last man in the world to ever be properly submissive—it wasn’t what he wanted from anyone, let alone me.
But in this case, in this moment?
It was what he needed.
What the pack needed.
I might not have been born a wolf, but I was one, straight down to my bones, and in the end, I would always, always do what my pack needed me to do. Up to and including get on my knees and pretend obeisance.
When I turned to look at the Wildwood wolves, I knew I’d gotten it right.
The huge blond guy who’d warned me was trying—and failing—to stifle a grin.
Behind him, the beautiful older woman was staring at me with an intensity that didn’t quite hide the same amusement.
She was his mother, I realized in the moment.
They had the same eyes, and in that moment, could have been siblings, for the similarity.
Grant, on the other hand. Grant looked like someone had just served him garbage for dinner and told him the solstice was cancelled.
Good.