“We’ve got to get going,” Dominic said. “You ready to defend your title and start the games?” There was laughter in his voice, and when I shifted on the bed to look at him, he was giving me an odd kind of look.

“I’m defending the title against you?” I asked, forging my voice to sound cool and uncaring, as if he was a pesky flea and nothing to worry about, but in all honesty, out of all the males I had met so far, Dominic was the one I worried about.

He didn’t answer. His eyes were dancing with amusement and he chuckled as he rose from his chair and headed for the door. But then I guess his laughter was enough to answer my question.

“I won’t go easy on you,” I said, sitting up. “I might not have meant to take over this pack, but I do intend on keeping it.” Part of me wanted to launch at him right then and there and end this … whatever this was that was brewing between us, but I couldn’t. No. I wouldn’t. I was going to do this by the rules. Every male had a right to challenge me once I overthrew the alpha. That was the point of this ceremony, and I needed to defend the title with honor and witnesses, not in a brawl in a grungy motel room. Tonight, I would either be taken down or I would remain standing. I intended to remain standing.

Dominic stopped at the door and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Hurry up, man,” he said with a smirk. “Let’s get this over with.”

CHAPTER 5

~ JADE ~

The walk home was quiet. Too quiet. I took the trail that cut through the woods. It ran from the school right past my house. It was probably just Dominic’s insinuated threat that Erika was lurking about, but the whole way home, I was on edge. At every bend in the path, my heart literally stopped until I could see that nothing was hidden around it, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end, sending prickling shivers down my spine. After the first two minutes or so, I was seriously kicking myself for not taking Aidan (or Dominic for that matter) up on the ride home.

Me and my stupid pride! That’s pretty much what it all boiled down to. I was too proud to ask one of those stupid dogs for help. And Aidan, well, I couldn’t think of a good excuse for that. Stupidity was pretty much all I had there.

I wondered if Aidan knew about the werewolves. I was pretty certain that he didn’t. If he did, he wouldn’t have faced off with Dominic as he had. I thought about telling him, warning him to stay clear of the pack, but each time the words ran through my mind, all I saw was his smirk and laughing eyes. He’d probably think I was a lunatic.

“Jade, where have you been?” Marcy yelled from my porch step, as I stepped out of the tree line. “I’ve been waiting for hours.” She raced over to me, throwing her arms around me in a too tight hug. “Don’t scare me like that again.”

Laughing, I pried her too tight arms off of my waist. “Really, Mac? Hours?” To say she was a little dramatic would have been a complete understatement. Marcy was one of those all or nothing kind of people, and she applied it to every aspect of her life. There was never a middle ground with her. And that was one of the things I loved about her the most.

She wrinkled her nose at me and tucked her long blond hair behind her ears. “Okay, maybe it was only ten minutes. But it felt like hours.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me over to the porch swing. “Did you hear the news?” she asked, as she plopped down, taking me with her. The swing creaked and cracked under our weight. She didn’t even take a breath for me to answer before she huffed and muttered, “No, of course you didn’t. I shouldn’t even know yet.”

“What news?” I asked distractedly, noticing that the oversized driveway was empty, and the house was quiet. I glanced at my watch, 4:15. Where were my parents?

“If I tell you, you have to swear not to breathe a word,” she said, giving me a stern look.

“Of course,” I grumbled and rolled my eyes. Marcy had been going through this gossip phase. It started about a month ago, and each day since, there was another big piece of ‘news’ that I couldn’t breathe a word about. It usually consisted of who was dating who, or what one of the she wolves had worn; a bunch of useless information, really. But like I said before, she was an all or nothing kind of person, and gossiping was no different from anything else. At least her information was harmless to those she talked about. Marcy didn’t have a malicious bone in her body. I leaned back on the swing, getting comfortable, and waited to be bombarded with whatever had sparked her interest today.

Marcy leaned into me; her vanilla spice lotion tickled my nose, and she whispered, “Ray is dead.”

If Marcy had wanted my attention, she got it. “Holy sugar sticks!” I shrieked, and I swiveled on the swing, making the chains creak. My eyes felt as if they were bulging out of their sockets. “He’s dead? You sure he’s not just on a bender again?” It wasn’t uncommon for the pack’s alpha to disappear for a few days (or weeks) when he started drinking again. Clearly, Dominic wasn’t kidding when he said the pack was stressed.

I felt sick. Guilt washed over me in nauseating waves of hot and cold. Had Dominic been reaching out to me because he needed a friend? Did I want to be that friend? Yes. No. Yes. Maybe.

Marcy held a finger to her lips and shushed me, and then she began wrapping a chunk of her hair around her finger, a nervous release she did often. That’s when I noticed her puffy, bloodshot eyes, and her wrinkly T-shirt. Marcy was a girly girl. She always looked perfect, and come to think of it, unless she was sleeping, I was pretty sure that I’d never seen her in a baggy T-shirt before. She tried to smile, but I could see through the act. Her lips were tight, forced into an exaggerated curve. If she had been wearing red lipstick, she would have resembled a demented clown.

She leaned into me again, dropping her voice even lower, as if she was worried someone would overhear her. “I overheard Dad talking about it at the station this afternoon so I snuck into his office and …” she let her words fall short and visibly shuddered before whispering, “I saw the pictures from the investigation. Ray had bite marks all over him. You know what that means, right?” Her eyes were as wide as quarters and that creepy smile twisted at the edges of her lips again.

I just sat there, staring at her speechless, and a small shiver rushed over my skin. A new alpha, a voice in my head whispered, but I couldn’t believe it. “Impossible,” I said, more firmly than I felt. “We would have known already if someone had challenged Ray. The pack doesn’t keep that stuff a secret. Are you sure the pictures were of him?”

Marcy pursed her lips and glared at me. “Of course I’m sure. I do work there.”

I rolled my eyes. I didn’t think a co-op class was classified as actually working anywhere. Well, maybe it kind of was work, but really, she had only been doing it for a week now. There were two detectives in Dog Mountain, Marcy’s dad being one of them, and he wanted her to follow in his footsteps. Or at least that’s what he said, but truthfully, I thought it had more to do with her mom walking out on them last year than career training. He wanted to keep a closer eye on her, and what better way than to have her spend half of the day on the job with him.

A gust of cool wind blew over us, rustling the leaves in the towering oak tree that sat in the front yard, and I shivered again. Fall was coming. I could feel it in the air, crisp and fresh. It wouldn’t be long now before the leaves changed. They were already starting; a small hint of red and yellow tinged the oak and maple trees surrounding my yard.

“I’m just saying,” Marcy said with a shrug. “He was a werewolf. I highly doubt it was a random drunk man falling into a ditch and being mauled to death by a wild animal kind of thing.” She arched a puffy brow at me then and asked, “What took you so long anyway?”

“Erika stole my clothes and left me pretty much naked in the gym locker room,” I said absently, my mind reeling with the threat of a new alpha. The recruiting would start again and then the power struggle; all of the wolves fighting each other for a higher standing in the pack. I had seen it happen twice in the last seven years, and each time had been worse than the last.

Marcy gasped and grabbed my arm. “You’re kidding.”

I let out a strangled kind of laugh. She was wiggling about on the swing, dying to hear the gossip. “Nope, and out of all the people who could have come by, it was Dominic that brought me my stuff back.”

“Dominic? Really?” she squealed. “Please tell me you two have worked it out, and the two year silent treatment is over.”

With a long and drawn out groan, I said, “Mac, seriously, he’s a jerk.” I cut her a look that I hoped showed how much I disapproved of the way she still idolized him. “You need to forget about him already. It’s been two years.”

Marcy, unlike me, had nothing against Dominic or the pack for that matter. It made no sense to me. It was their fault that her mother left, even if it wasn’t intentional. Marcy’s mom had never been okay with the whole werewolf thing (not that I blamed her) and last year she finally cracked — literally. She started doing drugs, drinking, and then a few months later, she just up and left without even saying goodbye. But, instead of blaming the pack, Marcy blamed her mom. I guessed there was something rational behind her blame, but seriously, shouldn’t she hate the wolves just as much?

She smacked my knee playfully. “I miss him, and he’s really not that bad. He hasn’t changed as much as you think. If you’d just give him a chance …” She looked at me, giving me one of those I feel sorry for you looks, and said, “I think he misses you, too.”

Misses me. The idea of Dominic missing me made the hair on the back of my neck and my arms stand on end and a small, but very noticeable, chill prickle over my skin. I tried to pretend that the shiver was from the brisk wind, but it wasn’t. My stomach twisted and jumped; my body was alive with a craving — a longing — for him, one that I was beginning to think time would not dampen.