“Sounds like a dream.” Anders nudged his mate’s shoulder with his own. “Our sons love to swim, but it’s hard to get them to a pool in the city regularly.”
Viktor held Angelique’s gaze when he asked, “What if you didn’t have to find a pool for your boys to play in?”
He watched her eyes narrow. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about selling your pack the Merced territory.”
There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by Angelique slowly easing herself backward. She swallowed before deadpanning, “You aren’t serious.”
“We’re very serious.” Viktor braced his elbow on the edge of the table and leaned forward. “I’ve looked at your public investments and the estimated profits from your restaurants. I know that you can afford it, and I also know that you’ve been looking for a piece of land.”
“If you were looking, why haven’t you left the city?” Margot asked, gentle but firm in the way only a healer could manage.
Anders’s voice was hushed, his joviality subdued by shock when he answered, “The virus spreads most in the cities and it’s where new weres go to look for help. If we went too far, more weres would fall through the cracks. We don’t want that to happen. We want to be where we’re most needed.”
“That’s why I’m offering you Merced,” Viktor continued. “You wouldn’t have to leave the city, but you could finally have your own territory, your privacy. You could really build something for all those weres who need your help.”
Angelique’s voice was thready when she asked, “Why would you do that?”
Viktor sat back in his chair and pulled Camille’s hand up. Pressing their twined fingers to his heart, he looked around the table at Theodore and Margot, at Angelique and Anders, until his gaze came back to the violet eyes that held his heart and soul.
“Because,” he answered, “we are all trying to build a better future. We all want something more than rivalry and suspicion. We want our cubs to grow up in a better world than the one we were born into.” Looking back at Angelique, he said, “You want to help people, Angelique. It’s all you’ve been doing since you came to this city. I think it’s about damn time someone made that a little easier for you.”
No, the weres weren’t perfect. He knew for a fact that they had their fingers in plenty of smuggling operations and blackmarket trading in the Underground. But the elves had their spies and the shifters had their death matches.
No one was perfect.
Angelique blinked hard and clenched her jaw. For a moment, there was no sound but the murmurs from below the balcony and the faint squeaking of ice cubes melting in glasses of water.
The were cut her eyes to Theodore, who watched the scene play out with a reserved expression. “And what about you? You’re okay with this?”
Theodore shrugged. “Don’t see why I wouldn’t be.”
“If we buy that land, we’d become a legally recognized pack,” she shot back.
“The first, as I understand it.”
“You are just… fine with a new faction being born right in the heart of your capital?” Angelique scoffed. “What’s the catch? If we sign off, you’ll revoke the semi-autonomous status of the land?”
“There isn’t a catch,” he calmly answered. “The land stays the same, and the pack that occupies it gets the benefits afforded to it by the treaty my grandfather signed. That’s it.”
Viktor jumped in to add, “You would become the Merced pack, Angelique.”
“If you do this,” Camille murmured, “you will set a precedent for all were packs. Someday you might even have your own representatives in the UTA Congress. Don’t you want that?”
Anders stared at the table, his expression awestruck, and said, half to himself, “Imagine how much easier it would be to look after the orphans, Angel. We could— we could build a school. We could let everyone build homes.” His voice cracked. “They could make families. Bring their mates home. Angel—”
Angelique grasped her mate’s hand and gave it a squeeze. The fight had drained out of her expression when she said, “I know, Andy. I know. I… I just don’t know what to say.”
“Say yes,” Viktor playfully demanded. “Say yes, or I’ll have to take the offer to the wolves.”
Half the table wrinkled their noses at the suggestion. “No,” Theodore replied. “I don’t get a veto but I’m vetoing that. Wolf shifters are insufferable.”
Angelique tilted her head toward the sovereign and grimaced. “Agreed.”
“Then take it. Save us all some trouble,” Camile encouraged.
Angelique shared a long look with her mate, communicating silently as only a mated pair could. Something profound passed between them before Angelique turned back to Viktor and rasped, “We’ll do it.”
Theodore brought his hands together with a resounding clap. “Fan-tastic! Now let’s get some meat in us. I’m godsdamned starving.”
Margot leaned over her husband’s arm to excitedly suggest, “Let’s get the cookies, too. This is a celebration now!”
“And wine,” Anders piped up, jubilant. “Lots and lots of wine!”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“What made you think of the weres?”
“Hm?” Viktor stood at his glass-topped desk and peered down at the tablet in his hand. They had made a pit-stop at the pack’s business office in the Castro District to make sure all of their physical copies of important documents had been properly packed out and ready to go, but he couldn’t resist glancing at the never-ending cascade of emails while he was there.
The door to his office clicked shut. It was followed by the dull thud of the old fashioned bolt sliding into place, and then the click of his mate’s metal-studded heels as she walked across the wood floor.
Bare lavender arms slid around his waist from behind. “What made you think of the weres when you first started planning this move?”
He looked down. Her skin was such a beautiful color, and when the sunlight filtered in through the slatted blinds, pulled nearly closed, it gilded her in hues of green and gold and pink. He would never get sick of admiring just how fucking gorgeous his mate was.
Viktor leaned back into her embrace. Covering one of her hands with his own, he set the tablet down on his desk, his focus drawn inexorably to the center of his universe. “You know, I’m not really sure. I never really considered them before last year.”
She nuzzled her nose against the back of his neck, tickling the sensitive skin there. “What changed?”
Viktor laughed. “You know, I think it was the teenagers.”
“The teenagers? Weres or ours?”
His chest swelled with pride when she so casually referred to their young packmates as ours.
“Both. They started running into each other a lot when they visited Margot’s Healing House, and because I escorted so many of our kids there, I got to know them.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think one day I just had this realization that they and their caretakers were so similar to my pack that it made me sort of… ache for them, I guess. I empathize with them. After that, it just seemed like a natural fit.”