“Only at the beginning. You convinced our capitol clientele to explore their tribal roots, and they came back for more. When they did, they brought friends and colleagues which expanded our customer base.” Dad scooped eggs and sausage onto his own plate. “I’m not saying your sire is a saint, but he made your professional success possible. He provided for your future and helped when we most needed it. The business would’ve gone under without his intervention.”
Those recommendations might be enough to win his dad’s forgiveness for years of neglect, but Arit wasn’t as nice. “He whispered in ears on our behalf, and I’m grateful he did.” He speared a sausage link on his fork. “Doesn’t mean I’ll suddenly be his pal.” He tipped his chin toward the television. “Especially when he’s fresh out of mate-able capitol children to fulfill a pact no shifter would recognize as legally valid.”
“He wanted to reunite with you long before the emperor returned from the dead.”
“He wanted me to visit him in the capitol.” Arit grunted. “No thanks. If he wants to see me, he knows where I am.”
Chuckling, his dad shook his head. “You two are so alike.”
“I’m nothing like him.” Arit growled. “Nothing.”
“You aren’t interested in political intrigues like your sire.” Dad patted Arit’s back reassuringly. “He’s alpha to his core, though, and so are you. When you feel insecure or threatened, you will both always try to maneuver the circumstances to your advantage, and that was what your sire attempted by inviting you to the capitol. He hoped to lure you onto his territory, his ground, where he has the strongest likelihood of retaining control of the situation.” His dad smiled. “You countered his offer by inviting him into your territory because here is where you feel safest.” He returned his attention to his breakfast. “One of you will eventually break the stalemate. I think you’ll win the war with your sire. He’ll accompany one of the tour groups from the capitol someday. No warning that he’s coming. Benjic will try to retain the slim strategic advantage he believes surprise will grant him, but he’ll arrive on the train with a tour group one afternoon, mark my words.” The programming on the television screen moved from commercials back to the breaking news about the last Marisek. “My guess is soon.”
Anxiety swamped Arit, and along with it, anger. Arit’s heart pounded. Adrenaline dumping into him made the hand holding his fork shake. He didn’t want to see his sire. Didn’t care. The only answers he’d ever needed was the persistent evidence of his other parent’s absence. If foolish hope screamed at him to give the stranger who was his sire a second chance, then hope could shut the fuck up.
Arit shrugged a diffident shoulder. “As long as he’s a paying customer,” he said, but deep down, he wished the bastard who had knocked up his dad and lit out of the mountains to scramble for power in the capitol would show up. Arit would enjoy putting that particular capitol shifter through the paces of nightlong hunts and the primitive conditions away from the lodge, in their upper camp where he taught clients how to thrive in the wild.
“Oh, he’ll pay. You’ve been making him pay for his mistakes since your teens.” His dad snickered. “The sparks the two of you will strike off each other should be entertaining. Keep the bloodshed to a minimum. That’s all I ask. I’ll work hard at not saying ‘I told you so’ while I patch you up after.”
Arit bristled. “No capitol shifter will ever hold his own in a fight against me.”
His dad laughed. “You go on believing that.”
Chapter Three
Abdicating the throne turned out to be more complicated than Nick had anticipated, and he’d expected it to be a pain in the ass.
He kept his posture straight and a cool smile in place as another tribesman—one in an endless stream of lower-level dignitaries whose names Nick couldn’t be bothered to learn—twirled him around another opulent ballroom. Lydia, an oddity as a human guest of the empire, waltzed by in the arms of an elder. Rolan refused to play social games altogether and glared on the fringes of the dance floor. Unaccustomed to formalwear, Nick itched in the new clothes he’d grudgingly ordered from the tailor recommended by Benjic once Nick had agreed to this farce.
Ten parties. Ten.
Each of the nine tribes had demanded an opportunity to host the last emperor during the abdication festivities, plus this, the tenth and final gala organized by the rebel council as its formal farewell to the monarchy. The tribes’ response to Nick astonished him. By war’s end, the people had hated the Mariseks. Nick distinctly recalled their loathing. When news of the imperial family’s execution had spread, aristocrats who had escaped the purges to fight had been bitterly disappointed, but the gambit had succeeded. Rather than rallying around the next Marisek in line to the throne, the White Army had crumbled. No one, not the nobles or their distant relatives, had cried or mourned Nick’s parents, his brothers and sisters…or for Nick.
He and his lawyers had hoped to gather enough leverage to negotiate the retrieval of his family’s remains and the bodies of their most devoted retainers from their unmarked grave. He would give up a lot, including his crown and title, to see his family decently buried—if possible in the Hall of Kings in the cathedral near the Winter Palace, where Mariseks had been laid to rest for four centuries. Nick had offered the tribes a hefty bribe from the Wallach trust and a blank check in arranging his abdication in trade for a state funeral for his lost family, but Nick had braced for disappointment.
Instead, the tribes had welcomed him “home” with parades, lavish parties, and more pomp than the tribes had mustered for any event in Nick’s memory. The grand celebrations and moon festivals he’d experienced as a boy paled in comparison.
The peasantry loved him.
Once the council absorbed the shock of his continued existence, most elders had come to admire and respect him, too.
Nika’s escape from the war to lead a commoner’s life had won instant acclamation. Here, the tribes crowed, was an emperor unafraid to get his hands dirty, which mystified Nick because managing a yarn shop wasn’t intense manual labor by any stretch. The closest Nick came to breaking a sweat was loading and unloading displays for his mom’s booths at farmers markets. Restocking their inventory wasn’t much of a task, either. Most days, he sat at a computer or at the head of a table while he taught middle-class empty nesters to knit. Compared to Rolan, who worked as general labor at a farm every single day, Nick was soft. Pampered. If the tribes desired an everyman of character in its exiled nobility, they wouldn’t find a better example than Nick’s adopted brother.