Faythe had opened up new possibilities for female leadership, but the percentage of tabbies who would naturally develop into Alphas was no greater than the percentage of toms who would, and Melody… Well, my sister couldn’t even pick a bottle of lotion without asking for a second opinion.
Regardless, I was little more than a temporary guardian of my future brother-in-law’s territory.
But that was nothing Abby needed to be reminded of.
“The truly hard part is getting the other Alphas to understand the relevance of electronic communication in modern Pride leadership.” I shrugged and forced a laugh. “You’d think email was synonymous with witchcraft, if you took Paul Blackwell’s word for it.” The old fart still hand-wrote letters to his fellow Alphas on honest-to-goodness carbon paper.
“That’s not what I meant.”
She’d meant that it must have been hard having to talk to Faythe so often after she’d picked Marc over me. Abby, like everyone else, was wondering if I’d gotten over losing the love of my life. Or whether I ever would.
According to the gossip from my own enforcers, the answer was no, and it always would be. But then, according to those clowns, Faythe had only picked Marc because she couldn’t have any of them.
“So, you haven’t seen Faythe in a while?” she asked.
I turned to see that the setting sun had turned her curls into living flames. “Um, it’s been about three years, I guess.”
Three and a half, but who was counting?
“Seriously? But aren’t most council meetings still held at the Lazy S?”
I nodded, and she frowned with the realization that I couldn’t have gone so long without seeing Faythe unless I was consciously avoiding her. And that was true, but it wasn’t just Faythe I was dodging. I was avoiding every memory I’d ever made at the Lazy S, because even the good ones were bittersweet in retrospect.
Especially with Ethan gone.
“About time,” I mumbled as the gate appeared ahead, beneath a familiar capital S lying on its side. “I swear, the drive from the airport gets longer every time.”
Abby groaned, as if she’d suddenly remembered something important. “Slow down!” She dove between our seats headfirst, placing her very well-shaped and barely covered hindquarters inches from my face.
“What the hell are you doing?” I pressed on the brake as I turned off of the highway, and it took every bit of willpower I could summon not to peek into the rearview mirror for an even more intimate viewing angle of what her skirt didn’t cover. As the vehicle came to a stop, Abby settled back into her seat holding a small square box she’d dug from a bag in the back.
A ring box.
“I almost forgot,” she mumbled, as she pulled her engagement ring out and slid it onto the fourth finger of her left hand. It was a single round diamond mounted high on a slim gold band, and the damn thing caught the dying light like rays from Heaven. I had to squint to see through the reflected glare.
“Why don’t you wear it at school?” I was caught strangely off guard by the rare reminder that she had been spoken for a long time ago. Not that it mattered.
Abby frowned at her hand, which somehow looked completely different with that one simple addition. “Because Brian… It’d be hard to explain to humans.”
Hell, her engagement would be hard to explain even to most shifters, who grow up knowing about the expectations placed upon a tabby at birth.
After narrowly surviving abduction, captivity, and gang rape the summer she was seventeen, Abby’s senior year in high school was very difficult for her. A few weeks in, she’d dropped out in favor of homeschooling with her mother, and shortly after that, she’d gotten her GED. Around April of that year, her parents had sent her to the ranch to spend time with Faythe and Manx, who’d both survived similar trauma—a little less in Faythe’s case, and significantly more in Manx’s.
Faythe taught Abby to fight and talked her into starting college. Manx kept Abby from withdrawing from the world physically and helped her deal with nightmares.
That summer, she also got to know Brian Taylor, Faythe’s newest enforcer at the time. Brian was young, and nice, and interested—I’d known him for years by then—and to everyone’s surprise, Abby didn’t shy away from his reportedly sweet and patient pursuit. By the end of the summer, she’d accepted his ring, to her parents’ delight, on the condition that the wedding be put off until she finished college.
Brian was amenable and that was no surprise. Engagement to Abby meant that he would be trained to take over her birth Pride. He would be an Alpha, a husband, and a father—opportunities rarely available to toms, because of the severe gender imbalance. Though their engagement was preposterously long by shifter standards, Brian was the envy of his peers.
But other than a few summer weeks spent on the ranch, he and Abby had hardly seen each other since she’d started school, and she only wore the ring when she went home. She was clearly no longer the shy freshman who’d joined my Pride, but neither did she act like a young woman eager for her wedding night.
Hell, my sister had subscriptions to three different bridal magazines, even though the face and name of her potential groom changed on a monthly basis, yet I’d never even heard Abby mention the ceremony her mother had been planning for years.
For his own sake, I hoped Brian was a very patient man, because no matter what she wore or how good she looked in it, Abby clearly wasn’t ready for a physical relationship. And she had five huge brothers perfectly willing to break all two hundred and six of his human-form bones before they buried him in a shallow grave, if he so much as thought about breaching the clothing barrier without express invitation.
Five huge brothers and me.
My rental car’s tires crunched on gravel as we drove through the gate, and my own troubles came into sharper focus. Unease sat like lead at the bottom of my stomach, yet somehow, returning to the ranch felt more like a homecoming than returning to my birth Pride had, four years before. Probably because I’d always been happy at the Lazy S, whereas taking over my birth Pride after I’d killed my stepfather had felt like launching a hostile conquest.
We passed the old barn, and even in the dusk, I could see that it had been repainted. It was still red, of course, because Faythe would want to create continuity between her father’s reign and her own to counterbalance the contrast in their leadership styles by keeping familiar landmarks familiar.
Smart. Greg had taught her well.
In front of the barn was the apple tree, naked for the winter season, and beneath it stood three headstones. They were equally weatherworn because both Ethan and Ryan had died within weeks of their father, the year of the revolution.
That’s what people called it because we’d changed the world that year. Our world, at least.
Humanity was still mired in the same old shit because they did a lot more talking than acting. But as a political science major, Abby was more qualified to expound upon that truth than I would ever be.
I sat straighter when the main house came into sight, and for a second, déjà vu was strong enough to be disorienting. Had it really been eleven years since I’d driven that same path, both eager and terrified to pledge my service and loyalty—hell, my very life—to Greg Sanders and the South-Central Pride? In retrospect, my seven years as an enforcer felt like both an instant and an eternity, as if I’d somehow stuffed a lifetime’s worth of experience and memories into a single bursting moment.
A moment I wouldn’t give back for the world.
“Looks like everybody’s home.”
Abby’s voice jolted me back to the present. The semicircle driveway was lined with cars, none of which belonged to the other Alphas. Marc would have picked them up at the airport.
I parked at the far end of the line and she was out of the car before the engine even died. “I’ll come back for my bag,” she called over her shoulder as she jogged toward the house.
For one embarrassingly long moment, I was captivated by the sway of her hips as she ran, highlighted by the beam from my headlights. Hell, even her shadow was alluring, with its exaggerated proportions and sleek outline. She really had grown up while I wasn’t looking.
And you still shouldn’t be looking.
Abby was my subordinate Pride member and the council chairman’s only daughter. She was likely still suffering long-term trauma from everything she’d been through. And she was another man’s fiancée. There was no of-age tabby in the country more off-limits to me than Abby Wade, and she deserved an Alpha who could respect that.
At least in action, if not in thought.
I got out of the car and made myself take the next few steps because if I hung too far back, everyone would think I was trying to avoid the inevitable, awkward reunion with Faythe. But the front door flew open before Abby even made it to the steps, and a tiny blur blew past her like that cartoon roadrunner, leaving a small dark smear across my vision.
“Uncle Jace!”
I knelt and braced for impact just as the child launched himself at me. “Logan!” I wrapped him in a bear hug, breathing deeply to take in his scent. Ethan’s son smelled almost exactly like he had, but the lingering grief his scent triggered couldn’t overcome my joy at seeing the boy. “What are they feeding you, kiddo? You got huge!”