Rachel Vincent - Alpha

“You have a lot of nerve showing up here,” a new voice growled from my left, and I turned to see Jerald Pierce—Parker’s father and Alpha of the Great Plains territory—stalking toward me from the kitchen.

“Thanks, I guess.” I shrugged and tried to let the animosity roll off my back, but it’s hard to stand tall in the face of pure loathing. Especially when so much of it is coming from a close friend’s father. No wonder Parker had opted to stay at the ranch, in the company of a growing collection of bottles. “Though I tend to think of it as a sense of duty and obligation to my Alpha.” My father. The strongest, most even-tempered and noble man I’d ever known.

“What about honor?” Pierce demanded. “Aren’t you the one always talking about doing the right thing? Where the hell was that sense of honor when you were handing my son over to be slaughtered by a flock of dirty thunderbirds?”

Well, at least it’s out in the open now …Though that did nothing to break the tension in the room.

“Faythe did what she had to do to save an innocent tabby’s life,” Marc insisted, flushed with anger, but obviously trying to keep his temper in check. “She made a decision only a real leader could have faced, and—”

“Bite your tongue before I rip it out of your mouth!”

Pierce roared, and Marc bristled like a tiger on alert. I moved closer to him, and to my relief—and surprise—Jace stepped up on his other side, ready to defend his Pridemate if necessary, in spite of their personal rivalry. “I always gave you the benefit of the doubt,” Pierce spat. “I even defended you when they said a stray could never be as good an enforcer as a Prideborn cat. But then you helped her lead my boy to the slaughter! What the hell is wrong with the bunch of you? How could you hand over a member of your own species to be pecked to death by a bunch of giant buzzards?”

I wanted to argue. To defend myself and my actions. But we’d discussed it with my father and had agreed not to comment on what happened to Lance Pierce. Including the fact that I’d ordered Marc to execute Lance to spare him from being eaten alive by the birds. Malone was sure to declare that a murder, rather than a mercy.

“I guess Cal’s right about strays. You’re genetically inferior. You didn’t give a damn about my son because you’re not even the same species. And you!” Pierce turned his dark-eyed fury on me, and I almost took a step back, floored by the depth of his hatred. “You’re an abomination. Turning your nose up at your real duty and obligation to hand over one of your own in cold blood. I feel sorry for your father, saddled with such a self-righteous whore for a daughter. Refusing to give him any heirs, yet flaunting two lovers in front of the whole world. You truly have no shame.”

I reeled like I’d been slapped. My cheeks flamed. I could actually see bright red patches of skin at the bottom of my field of vision. And the double standard burned like hellflames. If there was an enforcer in the room who’d only been with one woman, then I was Garfield.

“Jerald.” Paul Blackwell didn’t even raise his voice, but every head in the room turned toward him, and Pierce went silent instantly. The senior Alpha and acting council chair stood in the kitchen doorway, leaning on a worn cane, looking every bit of his seventy-something years. “You’ll have a chance to air your grievances, but this is not it.”

Pierce nodded angrily, but refused to back down, so I had to step around him to accept the key ring Blackwell held out to me. “Tell your father we vote at seven sharp. If he has any preliminary business, he’ll need to present it before that.”

The slight arch in Blackwell’s brow was so subtle surely no one else noticed it. But I knew what that meant. If we were going to play the ace up our collective sleeve, we’d have to do it soon.

I nodded, clenching the key ring, then turned and marched out the front door with Marc and Jace on my heels.

“If this doesn’t work, we are so fucked,” Jace whispered, as we walked across the grass in a straight line. “They’d string us all up now, if they could. There’s no way any of those three are gonna switch sides.”

“It’ll work,” Marc insisted, for once forgetting to growl at his rival. “It has to.”

I could only nod, still stunned by Pierce’s speech. My hand strayed to the left side of my coat, beneath which I could barely feel a long, straight ridge. Two thunderbird feathers, stained with Lance Pierce’s blood. Evidence that Lance had killed the young bird, and that Malone had tried to frame us for the crime, simultaneously weakening our defenses and diverting the aftermath from his own Pride.

Those feathers were the key to our preemptive strike. We hadn’t come for the vote. We’d come to prevent it—by charging Calvin Malone with treason.

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