Muscle and Bone (Breaking Tradition #1)

1. Avery

Avery

W ithout question, the gatherings were the worst part of being an omega.

If the guys at work could see me dressed in my black tailcoat and matching dress pants, the wing-collared shirt with studs and cufflinks, white piqué waistcoat and white bow tie, along with the black silk socks and the patent leather cap toe dress shoes…

they would laugh themselves into a coma. The good news was, they never would.

It wasn’t that I was hiding anything. They all knew I was a lupine, and therefore only part human.

My ancestors were not fully homo sapiens but homo canum as well, because, to put it simply, I was part wolf.

It was a mutation that gained a foothold at the same time humans were evolving from apes, and instead of us going extinct, like a million other species that blipped in and out of the fossil record, lupines stuck.

And even though both species moved through the centuries together, one was hidden in darkness and one lived in the light.

A hundred years ago, the species were segregated, not allowed to marry, barely even permitted to be friends, but like progress of any kind, there were reformers and radicals and people fighting for change and equality and inclusion.

Seventy-five years ago the courts ruled that humans and lupines were equal, and if a human being could be a police officer, then so could a lupine.

I was lucky, because I grew up in a time where me wanting to go into law enforcement had never been the pipe dream it was for my grandfather.

Even if it did mean I was still somewhat of an anomaly.

He was very proud the day I graduated from the academy, as was my mother.

My father, on the other hand, had explained to me, ad nauseum, that the occupation was both beneath me and not something that would, or could, even be tolerated once I was mated.

He changed his tune a bit when it was written into my contract, but assured me that a smart alpha could work around any clause, no matter how ironclad the language.

I would give him the indulgent nod at that point, which would bring about a quick end to our conversation.

As the son of one of the richest lupine families in Chicago, I was part of the jarl , the upper class, the elite, and was supposed to concern myself with only the glitterati of the city.

That had never interested me in the least. And while my father had insisted I join the family business, as only he would—I was an omega after all, good for very little—and my brother tried guilt to get me to come on board, and my sister threatened me with bodily harm, my mother had always been on my side.

She taught middle school in the inner city; I was a police detective.

We were the rebels in our family, two peas in a pod, each of us following our dreams.

“You’re late, Avery,” my parents’ housekeeper, Corvina, informed me tersely as I walked through the kitchen. She was there supervising the caterers, snapping out orders, something she loved doing.

“Good evening, Corvie,” I called out cheerfully, grinning wide.

“You, with the face and the dimples,” she fumed at me, but couldn’t help smiling. I was her favorite after all, had been since birth. “You’re not eating enough!”

“You always say that,” I teased her, breezing through the swinging kitchen door and out into the short hall.

From there I went to the closet, hung up my coat, and then slipped into the meandering crowd, moving through the ten thousand square foot limestone mansion in Chicago’s Gold Coast area.

I was hoping to fly under the radar until I could locate the sanctuary that was my mother. I just needed to keep my head down,

“Avery.” My brother, Ambrose, called out my name.

Normally, I was able to get the lay of the land first, but he’d spotted me before I could avoid him.

Someone, probably my brother, had gotten wise to me climbing up the side of the house on the rose trellis to my old bedroom.

That maneuver would dump me out on the second floor and allow me to make sure I looked presentable before I walked out my door and peered over the balustrade and down to the level below to check and see where everyone was.

But tonight, when I was about to start my climb, I saw one of Ambrose’s many assistants standing on my old balcony, clocking me and talking on his cell phone at the same time.

No doubt he was reporting my position to Ambrose.

My partner, Wade Massey, would have asked how I knew he was one of my brother’s flunkies.

And I would have told him it was because they all looked the same, like little clones from a GQ photoshoot, sycophants with their two-thousand-dollar suits, polished wingtips, and three-hundred-dollar haircuts.

“Come here!” Ambrose ordered, actually yelling, which he never did.

I would have told him it was gauche and stood there in mock horror, trying my best to look aghast, but I knew he was thinking it to himself as he looked around, appalled at his own behavior.

I’d hear about it later, what I’d “forced him to do,” but I didn’t care, and had no idea if it was the volume or his spontaneous action he was so chagrined over.

Either way, I continued with the pretense that I hadn’t heard him over the din of conversation, and said excuse me and pardon me a hundred times as I moved through the crowd to evade him.

“Avery!” my sister, Andrea, bellowed, which was in just as bad form as Ambrose, but I spun around and headed the other way through the press of people, moving under one of the arches in the cavernous living room of the house I’d grown up in.

“Avery,” Sandor Graves, our butler, a man who had served our family for as long as I could remember, barked, hoping to get me to stop so he could deliver me to my father.

I turned and waved at him like I was on the jumbotron at the United Center, but didn’t alter my course in the least because, really, did he think that was going to work?

Had it ever? He was not my father, and if I wouldn’t stop for the patriarch of our family, did Sandor honestly think I would stop for him?

Being a wolf, I could feel everyone closing in on me, and worse, because I was an omega, there was always that extra layer of hardwired, genetically engrained trepidation that came from being at the bottom of the food chain.

My brother and sister were both alphas. My mother had impressively birthed two, which was a feat that not many betas, as she was, could boast of.

When she had me, she’d received hundreds of condolences.

The odds were—in scrutinizing the members of her family tree, as well as my father’s—that I’d be a beta, or at least a gamma like many of my cousins.

It was just bad luck I turned out to be that which another family could claim for their own.

“Avery,” Sandor growled, closer than I’d thought, and I had that moment of fear, of dread, and I hated that even after all the years of police training, and the fact I had a Glock 22 strapped to my calf under my pants, still, I was responding like an animal and not a man.

It was one of the many reasons my wolf and I did not get along.

I felt our butler’s hand on my shoulder, slowing my momentum toward the salvation I could now see, and because I didn’t want to deal with him, or any of them, I cheated.

“Mom,” I yelled, shrugging off his hand, and I made sure my voice carried like it did when I used it on suspects to freeze or get on the ground .

People turned and stared, which would have mortified any other member of my family but not my warm, down-to-earth mother.

Elira Rhine Huntington snorted and quickly abandoned the circle of fawning admirers she was constantly at the center of at any party she, or anyone else, had ever thrown.

“My baby,” she gushed, rushing over, her movement made possible because people cleared a hole for the golden-haired goddess that was my mother. “How are you, love?”

I lifted my arms, walking toward her, and she filled them, wrapping around me tight. “I’m good, Mom. How’re you?”

She pulled back to look up at my face, her own lighting up with a smile that made her charcoal eyes, several shades darker than my own, crinkle in half.

“I’m wonderful, and so far I’ve got the winning bid in the silent auction for Chicago Blackhawks tickets,” she informed me gleefully, rubbing her hands together.

“That’s creepy as hell,” I assured her, pointing at her hands, which she instantly dropped to her sides.

“Pardon me?”

“You and blood.” I shook my head in seemingly solemn judgement.

“I’m sorry?” she replied, affronted.

“Action movies, MMA fights, hockey, documentaries about the mob, boxing, you’re all about blood and gore, lady. Back in the day I bet you would have gone to the coliseum and watched the gladiators.”

“Who?” She feigned shock, clutching her chest. “Me?”

I tsked at her, curling a piece of hair that had come loose from her long, thick side-braid, around her ear. “I can tell I’ve insulted you deeply.”

“To the quick,” she agreed, cackling as my father, Alexander Huntington, owner and chairman of the board of Huntington, one of the biggest builders in the country, stepped in front of us, scowling.

“Hello, darling,” she cheerfully greeted the man she loved, reaching for his hand, which he instantly clasped.

“Hey there, old man,” I taunted, giving him a quick clap on the shoulder.

I didn’t think his scowl could get any darker, but with those blue-black eyes of his, made somehow even more foreboding with his black hair and silver sideburns, it was possible.

“When your brother calls you,” he admonished through clenched teeth, “you treat that the same as if I were calling you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’m serious, Avery.”

“No, I know. But how many times in my life would you guess you’ve said that to me? Throw out a number.”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Avery.”