“The point, my love,” Theodore replied, “is not just about business or politics, but procreation. What happens if you contract yourself to someone, only to discover you can’t stand it when they touch you? Sure, you can attempt artificial insemination, but with odds already stacked against having children, it becomes nearly impossible to create a viable pregnancy that way.”
Viktor tried to breathe past the roaring fury currently tearing its way through his chest, but it was no easy task. The thought of his mate trying out every man on her list made him want to go absolutely feral.
It wasn’t going to happen that way, he decided. He wouldn’t let it.
By the time it came to the third meeting, she was already going to be his. The time she spent with those other men would be perfunctory at best. In and out, with a cold rejection tacked on at the end.
He wanted the thought to cool his temper, that territorial rage that made him want to bite and claw until he was too exhausted to do anything but sink into blissful darkness, but the memory of Camille’s voice coming through the door wouldn’t allow it.
If you can even make it on the list, I’ll have to see how you stand up to the elvish men I have in mind. No promises, of course. I’m afraid I already have my favorite picked out.
Who? Who was her favorite? Was it someone she was already attracted to? Someone she wanted to spend a week in a villa with, “assessing their compatibility”?
It was enough to make any fevered shifter want to rip his hair out. Mates didn’t sleep around. Mates were sacred; the bedrock of the pack. They were loyal to one another above all things. To think that his mate might find comfort and pleasure in the arms of another was the keenest kind of agony Viktor could imagine.
He had to take several deep breaths before he was capable of speech again. “Put me on the fucking list, Teddy,” he growled.
Theodore arched a brow. “Yeah? And how do I know you won’t fuck it up again?”
“Because,” he grated, “by the end of this week, we’re all going to be one, big, happy family.”
Chapter Ten
Viktor didn’t bother calling Benny for a ride. He was too keyed up to sit with his second and pretend that nothing was wrong, so he hopped on the m-lev and rode until he hit the boundary of the Merced territory.
Theirs was a small but beautiful enclave of greenery in the otherwise technologically advanced city. At its center sat Lake Merced, a marshy body of water with low, scrubby vegetation around its edges. Sturdy coastal trees clumped together in dense thickets, obscuring the homes of his pack members and the thin, winding trails they created. A long stretch of cold, windswept beach was only a short run away and closed off for the Merced pack’s use.
The territory itself was only a small corner of the city, but it had been theirs for nearly three hundred years — long before the elves swept in to take control. Back then, it was a mess of feuding factions and people looking for a new start in a freshly discovered territory. The shifters, easily adaptable and vicious, might have taken control of the area entirely if the elves hadn’t marched in one day, claws at the ready, and swept nearly the entire West Coast into their pockets.
It wasn’t that shifters weren’t capable of taking them on. Viktor could heal faster than any elf could, and though he lacked the diamond sharp claws and steel bones of the elves, shifters were elastic. They could take enormous amounts of damage and bounce back unscathed.
The issue was that elves, even when they hated one another, acted as a single unit for the best interest of the group. Shifters never could manage that.
Pack was the heart and soul of a shifter. It was what tied the animals in their hearts together, gave them a sense of purpose in a world that would otherwise not make a damn lick of sense to them. To live in a pack was to be important, no matter your position in the hierarchy. It was to know that you were loved, that someone would always be looking out for you, and that you had a place.
But between packs, the intensity of that loyalty could become a poison. The Alliance was as close as they came to truly putting their differences aside and pooling their political power.
Even that, as Viktor knew firsthand, was a shaky thing.
Still, it was better than living in the confined sliver of territory they were afforded by the EVP. He would take an uneasy truce over watching his own pack eventually wither away, families melting into other packs as they sought more space, more freedom to let their cubs roam.
He loved Lake Merced. As he shucked off his dress shoes and tied the laces together, he thought of what it would be like to say goodbye to the salty breeze blowing off of the ocean and the call of wrens in the hazy time between night and blushing dawn.
He imagined it would feel a bit like tearing out a chunk of his soul.
Viktor’s throat constricted as he wadded up his socks and shoved them in his pocket. He slung his tied up shoes over his shoulder and crossed the border into the intensely monitored perimeter of his territory at a loping run into the darkness.
His eyes changed automatically, shifting to the superior vision of the coyote’s. They glowed with reflective green as he wove through cypress and fir trees. Normally he would have already ditched his clothes and shifted, but he only had the one good suit left, so he was forced to satisfy the urge to run as a man.
The deeper he ran, the more he felt the ache of impending loss, as well as the bone-deep understanding that this was for the best.
The animal in him loved its pack, but it balked at the unnaturally cramped quarters they had been forced into. He should not have been able to see the homes of his packmates through the trees, though they were a familiar and comforting sight.
One’s den should never be immediately visible to outsiders. It was where mates and cubs were kept safe, where each pair had their own tiny territory. Although they had gone to great lengths to disguise their homes so that they blended in with the scenery, they were still obvious to anyone with eyes. There just wasn’t enough room to sprawl out as they should, to give each den and its family space.
Viktor knew that his pack felt a deep loyalty to the land on which so many of them had been born and raised their own cubs. He also knew that they felt hemmed in, exposed to the outside in ways that the animal could not accept.
The last straw had been the loss of three young families. All of them cited the same reasons for leaving the pack: they didn’t feel right raising their cubs in a cage. If he weren’t the alpha, bound in blood and magic to serve his pack, he might have made the same choice as them a long time ago.
As it stood, he was the alpha, and he couldn’t just sit and watch his pack die a slow, suffocating death.
No one stopped Viktor as he ran, though he felt the presence of several packmates pass him in the dark. They were quiet and moved like quicksilver even in their bipedal forms, but he would always know when they were near. They lived in his blood and in the wild heart of the animal that connected them all.
He was grateful that they sensed his aggression, his need for space. He knew they all wanted updates on their progress with the Alliance, but he could not give them that time tonight.
Tonight, he ran until sweat slicked down his back, until his lungs burned with exertion, and then doubled back around to do the circuit again. By the time he felt like he’d finally let off some steam, dawn was already starting to creep into the velvet dark.