Vivi Andrews - Serengeti Storm

She had no sympathy for him.

A sleek young woman appeared around the corner of a nearby bungalow, giving Shana a tentative smile and a sheepish little shrug of her shoulders as she headed in her direction. Shana gritted her teeth. Loralee. She had no sympathy for her either.

“It’s good to have you back, Shana,” Loralee called, even her voice sounding pathetically subservient.

Did the girl have no self-respect? Shana appreciated Loralee’s respect for power and dominance, but even doormats like pathetic little Ava demonstrated some spine once in a while.

“Is it?” Shana asked. Her voice was harsh and she did nothing to moderate the icy thrust of the words.

Loralee’s wary smile faded a few degrees. “Yes. I missed you.”

“Sure you did.” Loralee’d missed having someone to fight her battles for her is what Loralee had missed. “Who’s in my bungalow?”

Loralee’s face froze. She was never much of a quick-thinker and now she was trying desperately to figure out whether Shana was allowed to know the answer to her question. Which meant she acknowledged an authority higher than Shana. Unacceptable.

“Who, Loralee?” she demanded.

“Tyler!” Loralee bleated.

“Shit.”

Tyler. Caleb’s older brother. Not quite as big, not quite as rough, but not someone Shana could tangle with and win.

"You could have just told me,” Shana snapped.

“Alpha said we couldn’t. He said it didn’t matter who it was. It was the principle of the thing.”

Of course. The principle. Trust the demented Alpha to make a big damned deal about principles when he could have just told her she didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning it back.

Shana turned and looked at the borrowed bungalow. It actually wasn’t that bad. As a starting point. A few challenges and she could trade up—principles be damned. Even if she couldn’t get her own place back, that didn’t mean she couldn’t get some nicer digs. And when she was the Alpha’s mate, even Tyler wouldn’t deny her. She’d have her place back. And her rightful place in the pride.

Goddesses and queens did not beg. Or fight. People gave them things.

“Your mother’s asking for you.”

Shana flinched at Loralee’s softly uttered words. Her mother. Living proof that queens did beg. Pathetic, deposed, drunkard queens who had lost all claims on self-respect. “What does she want?”

“She wants to see you,” Loralee said gently. “She’s missed you too.”

Shana knew what Loralee had missed. It was a little harder to pin down what her mother might have missed in her absence. A handy chauffeur to the nearest liquor store? Someone to look down on when she’d sunk so low it was hard to imagine anyone lower?

“She can go screw herself,” Shana whispered, barely mouthing the words.

“What was that?” Loralee asked, sweetness and innocence and weakness personified. Pathetic.

“I’ll go see her myself,” Shana said louder, brushing past the smaller female.

She sloshed through the melting snow, her mind closed to the pleasures of the winter sun and the playfulness of a snowy morning. She was going to see her mother. Firing squads were more congenial.

Brenna Delray’s bungalow stood on the outermost edges of the residential compound, secluded and dark. There were no lights on inside, but Shana knew better than to think that had anything to do with whether anyone was home.

She knocked on the door sharply. A small, cowardly part of herself she hated to admit even existed hoped Brenna wouldn’t be awake. Or had already passed out for the day, even though it was only mid-morning. Anything to keep her from having to walk through that door.

“Shana, honey? Is that you?” A thin, reedy voice floated through the door.

Shana closed her eyes for a second, slumping in on herself. She only allowed herself a heartbeat. Goddesses don’t wallow. Then she snapped her spine straight and pushed open the door. “Hello, Mother.”

All the shades were drawn, but Shana saw her mother clearly enough in the dim light.

Brenna never left the house, unless alcohol was being served in the dining hall. She hid behind her former position, using it as an excuse to ignore the unwritten rule that everyone contributed in the pride. The pride had its own doctor, carpenter, schoolteacher and mechanic, making it as self-sufficient as possible. Those who chose to worked in the nearby town or found opportunities to work online, like Shana did, to bring money into the pride. They weren’t work-obsessed—Shana had never met a lion who defined himself by his day job or cared more about fancy cars than his afternoon siesta—but everyone pitched in.

Except Brenna.

She sat in a threadbare armchair, curled in a ratty knit shawl, with both hands curled protectively around a tumbler glass filled with amber liquid.

If it’s Tuesday, it must be Scotch.

The air was musty and thick in Brenna’s bungalow, or Shana’s lungs were closing off, she never could quite determine which. She shoved a stack of Star magazines off a chair and perched on the edge. She was always on edge here. Her mother might be cheerfully buzzed now, sweet and docile as a lamb, but Shana knew better than to get comfortable. She knew what was coming at the bottom of bottle number two.

“How’ve you been, Mother?”

“Me?” Brenna batted her hand at Shana playfully. “Oh, you know me. Same old, same old. Did you hear about Brad and Jen? Breaking up like that? Isn’t that sad?”

“That was years ago, Mom.”

Brenna didn’t respond to Shana’s words. She just sipped her Scotch and sighed, shaking her head wistfully. “She was such a nice girl, that Jen. Not like that hussy, Angelina.”

Shana braced herself for the inevitable comparison. She must’ve heard a thousand over the years. “No one respects a trollop, no matter how many African babies she adopts.” “You know better than anyone how a slut like that thinks.” “A skank is as a skank does, wouldn’t you agree, Shana?”

But Brenna wasn’t quite that drunk yet. Still in her friendly first bottle of the day. Instead of the biting words Shana was braced for, she just shook her head and gave a misty smile. “So sad.”

“Yeah. Sad.” Shana said nothing more. Words weren’t power with her mother. They always seemed to become weapons that would boomerang back to her, slicing her open. So she said as little as possible as her mother finished her drink and poured herself another with hands that were surprisingly steady.

“You went away, Shana-bay,” her mother cooed. “You left me.”

Shana swallowed back the guilt that rose like bile, involuntary and unwelcome. “I thought you’d understand why. You were always talking about the proud tradition of the lions. You said without tradition we were nothing. That we had to honor Leonus as the Alpha, even though he killed…” She paused and cleared her throat. She knew better than to say her father’s name. She’d already said too many words. Too many weapons getting ready to spiral back on her. “I thought you’d hate the direction the new Alpha is taking the pride.”

“Of course I hate it,” Brenna said with a vacant smile. “That’s why you needed to stay. A strong mate can turn the Alpha’s head whichever way it needs to go. Why, when your father was Alpha, I don’t think he ever made a single decision without consulting me first.”

Except the decision to accept a younger, stronger lion’s challenge and get himself killed. He did that all on his own. And then the pride belonged to that bastard Leonus. The words itched to jump out of Shana’s mouth, but she kept them tight to her chest.

Now was not the time to speak out. Her mother’s nostalgic drunkenness came right after friendly drunkenness. And right before the worst part. At the rate her mother’s glass was emptying and refilling, the worst part wasn’t far away.