Page 118 of Contested Crown

“How long do we have until the next crew shows up?” I asked Jason.

“An hour. Maybe two.” He swallowed. “What do you want us to do?”

“Explain the numbers to Cade. Explain the whole system. He needs to be caught up.” I glanced at Cade, and he nodded, shuffling Jason off to the side of the room where two large computer monitors took up most of the space.

I crouched down in front of the wolves, inhaling deeply. If they were going to be mine, part of my pack, I needed to know them on scent. I caught their noses twitching as they smelled me in return.

“All right. Up. You’re the first members of my pack. Joel, Pablo, Samuel. If you have any hesitation, tell me now.” I watched, but the three of them sat up, shaking their heads. Samuel kept sniffing the air, his body relaxing.

We hadn’t been allowed to be a pack. Declan wouldn’t let us because that would mean someone was alpha and it wasn’t him. But that didn’t mean that we still didn’t yearn for it, didn’t want the deep sense of belonging, completeness that came with being part of a pack.

They didn’t even look at each other anymore, their eyes fixed on me with the certainty that I, their new alpha, would take care of whatever came up.

“Okay. Tell me what’s new.”

Joel cleared his throat but then started talking. After I left, things had run the same as before. The only difference was that now JD was in charge of putting out fires.

“And he’s, like…” Joel trailed off, glancing at the other two.

“He’s bad at it. Like, really, terribly bad.” Pablo shook his head.

“He switched up the schedules, the territories, and it gave the cops an in to take out one of the crews because he put it too close to a school.” Samuel rolled his eyes. “So then Declan got mad. Then, we had to run all our problems by Declan.”

He stopped talking, glancing at the other two, and I immediately saw the problem. Declan was terrifying at the best of times, and I had had years of personal acquaintance to get used to him. If there were problems, no one was going to bring them straight to Declan.

“So we’re down a crew, and no one has been putting out fires for weeks.” I raised both of my eyebrows. “Is that about the gist of it?”

“The new drugs,” Piper said. When everyone looked at her, she tucked a strand of hair under her hairnet. “Two or three weeks after you left, Declan pulled all of the Reaper. He replaced it with Thorn.”

Now we were getting somewhere.

“Tell me about Thorn.” I looked between Piper and Lee.

“We might need to show you.” Piper stood, then hesitated, as though unsure if I was about to attack.

I nodded, and she and Lee rushed back to the long metal tables they used. When I stood up, the three wolves crowded close around me, and I blinked, realizing what they needed.

For the first time in years, maybe their whole lives, they were part of a pack. I needed to make them feel welcome. I needed to make sure they knew they belonged to me, with me, that they would always have a home now.

A normal alpha would do this through fear, forcing them to stand behind him, almost like wrapping a collar around their neck. There was security in that. If you wore a collar, you belonged to someone.

But there was a different way. My mother’s way.

And more than that, I thought about all my reasons for wanting to wear Cade’s collar. What was it about him that made me want to lay down my neck and feel the slide of leather on my skin?

I turned around, and the wolves hesitated, part of them itching to run from the more powerful force. I pressed a hand to Pablo’s shoulder. Rubbing the underside of my wrist against his throat, I met his eyes and said, “I’m glad you’re with me, Pablo.”

His mouth dropped open slightly, his eyes widening as they met mine. I repeated the gesture with Samuel and Joel.

By the time I got to Joel, he leaned into my hand like a puppy seeking comfort. They had been working for years under Declan, but they were still almost pups. They couldn’t have been more than twenty, and it made me feel too old.

“Show me Thorn.” I turned to Piper and Lee, observing the long silver tables.

“You know with Reaper, we had to cut it and then package it.” Lee gestured to the scales and the boxes of cutting agents, each one meticulously labeled. The problem with Reaper, which was based on some plant from Northern Europe that could be distilled down into a powder through a complicated chemical process, was that if you gave wolves pure powder, they would experience the best high of their lives and then drop dead.

“How is Thorn different?” I asked.

“We get Thorn in powder form,” Lee said. He pulled a brick over toward himself, the wrapped package holding the powder tight. When he sliced it open, a pale brown powder spilled out. Then he pulled over a container filled with white powder. “But we cut it with Reaper.”