My father took his glasses off to polish the lenses, and only once he had them back in place did he meet my gaze. “Calvin had an entire list of policy changes ready to go before the vote, and since then, he’s been introducing one after another. So far, about a third of them have passed, and each time, Paul Blackwell has been the swing vote.”
Dread clenched my stomach like an iron vise.
Unfortunately, even with the new unspoken hostility between them, Blackwell and Malone still shared a few ideological tenets, such as the belief that strays had no place within a Pride, and that a tabby’s primary responsibility is to provide her territory with its next generation. So if Blackwell could be counted upon to vote his conscience—and history had already proved that he would—he would have to support Malone in most policy changes intended to hurt me and/or Marc.
Shit. “What’s passed so far?”
“New Alphas must be approved by a simple majority of the council before they will be officially recognized,” my uncle said, his frown deepening until I thought his face would collapse in on itself.
That one could be aimed at either me or Marc, and would no doubt apply to Jace, too, if his father had any idea how much of a threat Jace had become. “Wow, they’re planning way ahead. What else passed?”
My uncle sighed. “All Prides must pay a monthly stipend to a discretionary fund that will be used to finance council business.”
“What kind of business?” Marc asked, as he drained the first skillet of beef.
“Establishing a new, permanent council headquarters, hiring new enforcers as needed…”
Anger burned in the back of my throat, where a growl itched to form. “For which Pride? Malone’s, I assume? We’re supposed to pay for him to hire new thugs? No way in he—”
“Not for him,” my father interjected, before I could complete the planned profanity. “Enforcers for the council at large, to handle any issue that involves more than one Pride. They’ll be like state troopers, to our city police.”
“That one’s a direct shot at your dad,” Uncle Rick
added. “For handling the Manx issue on his own instead of turning it over to the council.”
It took real effort to make my pulse stop racing, and to keep my teeth from Shifting out of fury. “Is that it?” If those were the laws that passed with Blackwell’s vote, I could only imagine what kind of horrible proposals he’d actually found objection to.
“Those are the most threatening so far.” Di Carlo ran one hand through hair still thick and dark in his late fifties. “But we’re supposed to debate one more this afternoon…” He glanced at his fellow Alphas, none of whom seemed inclined to complete Di Carlo’s aborted sentence.
Every hair on my body stood straight up. “What? What’s the new proposal?”
Finally my father sighed and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking more pessimistic and frustrated than I’d seen him in a very long time. At least when Ethan died, he’d gotten angry. I’d much rather see him angry than discouraged. “Faythe…His new proposal says that no woman can serve as an enforcer until she’s given birth to a daughter.”
Noooo…
My uncle took one look at the horror surely clear on my face and rushed to explain. “Originally the policy said that no women should be allowed to serve, period, but Blackwell balked at that, so Malone tacked on the daughter codicil. And it looks like Blackwell’s going to support that one, too.”
Of course he was. He’d always believed that I was better suited to a diaper bag than a pair of handcuffs.
“The problem is that there’s no good way to protest that one,” Di Carlo said. “If we want to survive as a species, we do need…” His voice trailed off, but we all knew how that sentence should have ended.
I’d grown up knowing one great, pervasive truth, and had discovered another since I started working for my father. The first was that in order to survive, the south-central Pride needed me to give them children. Because of a genetic inconvenience, there were usually four to six boys born before each daughter, and like most tabbies, I was the only girl in my family. The vacancy of my womb meant the end of my family tree and extinction for my Pride. There was no way around that.
The second—equally important—was that I wanted to serve as an enforcer, and some day as an Alpha. I had yet to come up with a compromise between my own personal rock and hard place, and until I did, the council—especially now that Malone was leading it—would use that against me.
It’s not that I was opposed to the idea of having children. I never had been. However, if, when, and with whom were my decisions to make, and no one had the right to take those choices from me. But Malone had obviously found a new way to try.
I blinked, but the room refused to come back into focus. My blood raced so quickly the whole cabin seemed to spin. I glanced at my father, desperately wishing he would tell me I’d heard wrong. That Malone wasn’t trying to get me fired and sentence me to serial childbirth, all in one fell swoop.
But he couldn’t.
I dumped the dry noodles into the pot, struggling to control my temper, then turned to face the rest of the room again.
“So we’re agreed? Malone must die.”
The cabin got quiet after lunch. The Alphas had gone to the main lodge to try to keep the most sexist policy proposal ever written from becoming official Pride law, and I could do nothing but wait for the outcome. And ponder my future. And wash the dishes.
Teo and Vic had volunteered to make one of their mother’s recipes for dinner. Teo went to town for supplies and Vic had insisted on going with him, ostensibly to make sure his older brother didn’t mess anything up.
But the truth was that he didn’t want to be near me and Jace. He was taking our relationship almost as hard as Marc was, and had barely said a civil word to either of us since we’d gone public. I think he was even a little mad at Marc for not pressuring me harder for a decision. Or killing Jace.
Jace had offered to help with the dishes, but I sent him into the living room for a tense, overtly hostile game of cards with Marc and my cousin Lucas, who tried to keep the peace. I needed time alone to think, and I wasn’t up to watching Marc watch me and Jace, waiting for our hands to touch accidentally on purpose in the soapy water.
I’d just set the last plate in the dish drainer when the rumble of an engine drew my gaze to the front window. I expected to see Vic and Teo Di Carlo returning in the rental van, but instead, I saw a gray sedan passing slowly on the narrow gravel road that ran across the cabin complex.
The car was unfamiliar, but there was no mistaking Colin Dean’s shock of white-blond hair in the driver’s seat. There was second man in the front passenger seat and a third in the back, both facing away from me. But as they drove directly in front of our cabin, Dean gestured toward it, and the other toms turned to look. And my heart literally skipped a beat.
I knew them both. The big guy up front was Gary Rogers, whom I still half thought of as Deep Throat. I’d broken his arm to get him to talk, in the woods behind Malone’s property when we’d snuck in to get Lance Pierce. And the tom directly behind him was Jess…something or other. Jess had pinned, then groped, me, and Marc had bitten off the offending thumb and left him to bleed next to the grave they’d dug for Jace.
What the hell were they doing in Montana? Even if Malone thought he needed extra security, those two would surely have been his last choice, after failing to stop me and Marc from rescuing Jace and taking Lance. Which only left one possible reason for their presence: they were witnesses.
“Guys!” I twisted the faucet too hard and it creaked beneath my grip until I loosened it.
Marc