During my first four years as Alpha of the Appalachian Pride, I’d struggled with many things. Expelling my own half brother. Convincing my baby sister that she doesn’t have to voice every thought that pops into her head. Assembling and training my own team of loyal enforcers from scratch. But sitting next to Abby for hours at a time had turned out to be its own special challenge.
She’d transferred into my territory as a withdrawn but determined college freshman interested in nothing but personal barriers and schoolwork. Which made sense, considering what she’d been through. But at some point since, little Abigail Wade had come out of her shell.
I’d first noticed her new grit during her fall break, when she took out three homicidal human hunters without waiting for backup. But it wasn’t the reckless disobedience that stood out. It was her relentless insistence that she’d done the right thing. The thing I would have done in her situation. She wasn’t afraid of the hunters, and she sure as hell wasn’t afraid of me, and I found something captivating in her unflinching confidence. Something exciting.
Even if it led her to question every decision I made.
Her disposition wasn’t the only part of her that had come out of its shell. After hours in a car and on a plane with her, I still couldn’t decide whether she had no idea how amazing she looked in that skirt or she knew exactly how amazing she looked in that skirt.
It only took me five minutes to realize I had no business knowing which of those was true.
We were three miles from the ranch, stuffed into the cramped front seat of my rental car, when Abby turned to me with a familiar look in her big brown eyes. That look said she knew that curiosity would eventually kill the cat, but she really didn’t give a damn. “When was the last time you saw her?”
I squinted at the windshield as a car passed us with its brights on, though the sun hadn’t quite set. “Saw who?”
As if I didn’t know.
“Faythe. You guys have been working together to present this new resolution, right? To officially recognize a Pride made up of strays?”
A long rope of red curls fell over her shoulder, and I had to stop myself from reaching out to touch it.
“They prefer to be called ‘wildcats.’” Even though Pride cats had a slightly different definition for the same term. “But yes. Most of that’s been done over the phone, though.” Thank goodness. “If the resolution passes, we’ll be making history.”
For the first time ever, strays—werecats infected by a scratch or a bite rather than born into our world—would have a place to go for help, sanctuary, and company. They’d have an official presence and a voice. And their Pride would have a vote on the council, of equal worth to that of all the other Prides.
This potential new Pride wouldn’t have an official name until it was formally recognized, but unofficially, we were calling it the Lion’s Den.
“Working with her must be difficult for you,” Abby said.
Understatement of the millennium.
As the first female Alpha in history, Faythe was practically a legend in every shifter society on the planet. She’d shattered the glass ceiling with her notoriously hard head and ripped the no girls allowed sign from the council’s clubhouse. Faythe had paved the way, at least in theory, for every tabby who would come after her.
I, on the other hand, was the only tom in the world ever to have been dumped by a female Alpha, which had left certain members of the Territorial Council less than confident in my ability to lead. In a society where the respect an Alpha commands is crucial to the authority he wields, how were they supposed to have any confidence in me when she’d found me lacking?
Not that any of that would matter for long. My sister, Melody, was nineteen. When she married, I would be expected to train her husband so he could take over the territory with her at his side. Matrilineal inheritance had always been the norm so that our few tabbies could stay in their birth Prides, which would be run by the Alphas they chose as husbands.
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.