Page 144 of Ascendant King
“Just give me a minute. One minute. That’s all I need.” Rhys waited until I nodded, then spread their hands, and I felt the soft brush of their magic rushing over me.
“No business suit. Nothing that looks like it’s something a mage would wear,” I said.
“It’s like you don’t even trust me.” Rhys shook their head. “No magewear. Iknow.”
When they were done, I felt refreshed, as though I had just stepped out of a shower and been buffed and polished within an inch of my life.
“Everything good?” I asked.
“Perfect. You look ready to take on any werewolf alpha that wants to be stupid. And the Paris runway after.” Rhys stepped back, falling into line with Nia behind my right shoulder.
I glanced at Cade, who stood at my left. His eyes were heated as they dragged over me, and I glanced down to see that Rhys had changed my outfit. I was no longer wearing a T-shirt and jeans, or, at least, no longer wearing thesameT-shirt and jeans.
Instead, I wore light pants that clung to my muscles and a shirt that was the same color, but, “Rhys, is this a polo shirt?”
Rhys gasped dramatically. “I wouldnever. It’s my own design, mixing the polo aesthetic with the functionality necessary for a werewolf alpha. And it comes with a coat!” Rhys rushed to offer the suit jacket, but I waved them off. The last thing I needed was to appear too much like I was trying to be Declan Monroe and failing.
The interruption should have taken me off my game, but instead, I took one look at the heat in Cade’s eyes and continued moving. It was true—I didn’t want to come into this looking like I had been expecting to be moving boxes all day.
I strode up the drive, collecting more of my pack as I walked, giving myself as much time as possible to come up with something to say.
My mother had always made it look so easy, and I didn’t understand how I had inherited everything else from her, except for the ability to make giving speeches look easy.
Emilio pushed through, coming up beside me. He clapped a hand on my shoulder and leaned in.
“You’ve got this. Elena set a pretty high bar, but I’ve seen you go over it more than once. You can do this. She believed in you, even when you were a teenager. She used to talk about it.”
“I don’t know that her expectations make me feel better about this,” I said quietly.
“She was the best of us, and she raised you to be that too.” He squeezed my shoulder and released, placing himself just behind Nia in pack order.
At the front gates, I could see the wolves on guard duty were nervous. Nothing had happened yet, but a half dozen wolves who weren’t on duty were collected on our side, ready to give support if any of the strange packs attacked.
They fell into line behind me, and I glanced back, seeing the spread of our pack. We had grown, almost two hundred members now, meaning that we could put up a good fight if we had to. Cade laced his fingers in mine, and I turned, my eyes catching on the tattoos still on his neck. The wolf in the Los Santos Pack symbol seemed to lift its head and snarl.
Looking at him, I realized I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want him or anyone else in my pack to get hurt, not for something like this.
I gestured for the guards to open the gate, and they pressed a button, the metal bars pulling back. Outside had to be a thousand wolves, and Chief Fox had already called me to let me know that if any more showed up, the state was talking about sending in the National Guard. She’d implied that she could hold it off for a bit longer as long as I kept the pot sweet.
But I knew better. The local government wanted to let werewolf politics shake out in the power vacuum that the fall of the mage houses had left. Then, they would swoop in to deal with whoever won.
I inhaled, stepping out, keeping myself at the head of my pack.
“I heard one of you wants to fight me,” I called.
I saw a few people step forward, recognizing them from the Alpha’s Council. Before they could say anything, I spoke.
“But I don’t want to fight you. Iwill. I’ve told you I will. I’ll take down any one of you. But I amsickof wolves fightingwolves.” I looked around the crowd. Some would see it as a weakness, but others had been fighting their whole lives. “We do not need to fight each other. The mages have kept us scrabbling over every inch of territory for every right in this country. They have kept us desperate and hungry and scared of our own shadows. They kept us crossing the street to stay out of their way. But now their power is gone. And we’ve been so trained to think we don’t have anything that now you want to fight over what wedohave.
“Because right now what we have is opportunity. We have a chance. A real chance to build something new. We could build a pack system that rivals the mage houses at the height of their strength. We can create networks based on loyalty rather than competition. We could have everything our parents didn’t dare to dream of.”
“With you at the head?” the Pineridge Springs alpha called out. He shoved his way to the front, arms crossed, glaring at me.
“With someone who doesn’t want war as our emperor,” I corrected.
“Withyouas our emperor. All these pretty words don’t mean anything because you want us bowing down to you. Your pet mage destroyed the mage houses, but that doesn’t mean you get to collect the spoils.” He looked around the crowd, and I heard some murmurs of agreement.
“We can fight.” I nodded in agreement. “Let’s say I fight you and that I fight Three Lakes East, and Three Lakes West, and Sierra Nevada pack, and the Channel Islands pack. I can fight my way up and down the state, and maybe I win, maybe I lose, but the real loser is going to be werewolves everywhere. Because while we are fighting amongstourselves, the mages are going to be using all their money to make sure that they don’t lose any of their power. We haveonechance. We have one chance to make life better for ourselves and our kids and our kids’ kids.”