Alisha shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter why because we’ve already won this war. The dragons were beaten on every front. In Scandinavia and in Britain—probably Asia, too.”
“Yes, but Mom, seriously…they would’ve had Scandinavia if not for intervention from the future. The kind of Deus Ex Machina we might not have access to the next time the dragons decide to come after our portals. And we have no way of knowing for sure that’s not exactly what they’re planning to do.”
“You really think that?” Alisha asks him, her voice incredulous. “We barely took your so-called dragon threat seriously when FJ and Olafr came through the first time. The Lupine Council wasn’t even willing to fund those swords they bought. You know why? Because no one has heard of or seen dragons in centuries. You say there’s no way of knowing they’re not a threat. I say there’s no way of knowing they weren’t completely decimated, thanks to the Detroit-Norway wedding contract.”
“You forget, Mom, I’ve actually read all of your academic work. According to your own research, dragons were said to live a very long time. A few were said to have lifespans measured in centuries. So what’s to say they haven’t been lying low all these years? Biding their time until they have enough weapons to decimate us and take our portals? The Black Box Initiative will make sure that doesn’t happen. That it will never happen.”
Alisha shakes her head at him. “And meanwhile, while you’re chasing down a phantom enemy, no wolf will be able to connect with his or her North American fated mate ever again.”
“Or run away from her fated mate,” Rafes reminds her with a raised eyebrow.
As respected and revered in the wolf community as Alisha is now, sometimes it was left to him to remind her that their years in Viking Age Norway weren’t a fever dream. Her running away from his father to Norway with their unborn pups in her womb actually happened. A nearly family-destroying thing that would have been prevented had the black boxes been in place.#p#分页标题#e#
But of course his mother doesn’t see it that way.
“Wow,” she says, blinking up at him, her expression incredibly hurt. “Your father’s forgiven me for that, but it looks like you’re not ever going to.”
Rafes let’s out another irritated grunt at the thought of his father. For all the practical business sense he’d passed down to Rafes, the former King of Colorado is nothing less than a besotted fool when it comes to his queen. Not only has he forgiven her for Norway, he continues to let his wife use the Nightwolf Foundation’s billions of dollars to follow whatever whim she wants—even if that whim includes fighting his own successor tooth and nail over the Black Box Initiative.
But Rafes is not his father. He looks down at his mother and asks, “Are you going to tell me why you’re going to Norway or do I have to call in the North Dakota beta to have you forcibly removed from these chains and caged until you tell me what I want to know?”
Alisha’s eyes merely flash, defiant as always. “I think you’re going to have to call in Clyde. I want to know just how far you’ll go to advance the Lupine Council’s rollback agenda to keep me and every other she-wolf in North America under their thumbs because they’re afraid of all the sexual freedom we have now.”
Rafes clenches his jaw. “Mom. If you accuse me of being anti she-wolf one more time—“ He stops and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m not anti she-wolf. I’m actually trying to protect you and every other she-wolf in North America. And if I have to deny a few wolves their dramatic love stories to do that, so be it.”
Alisha sucks her teeth again. “Yeah, right. Do you know how many human and wolf rollback initiatives have been pushed through on the premise of protecting women?” Alisha makes air quotes around those last two words. “Nah, I’ll take our portals and leave the protecting up to the individual wolves themselves.”
Rafes truly respects his father more than any other wolf on earth. But he seriously cannot understand how he’s put up with this she-wolf for over three decades.
He throws up his hands. “Okay, Mom, I don’t care. Go to Norway. Try to convince them to turn down my black box request. But you’ll be wasting your time because nothing you can do or say will keep these boxes from going up. First here, then around every other portal in the world.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Yeah, you will,” Rafes answers, standing his ground.