Page 1 of Bitter Discord

CHAPTER ONE

OCTOBER 15, 2022

It was an early Saturday morning, one of those where I didn’t want to be up, but I had to be. The constant strain of responsibility and things that needed to get done bled into weekend mornings when I would rather sleep in. Staring at the list of things I still needed to do, I wasn’t even sure where to start. It seemed like an easy list of errands, but this morning, they felt insurmountable.

“Jacky, glaring at the list won’t make it go away.”

Groaning, I pushed away from the desk as I looked up to see the gorgeous man sharing my office today. Heath Everson, my fiancé, the werewolf business-owning family man, didn’t have a desk in my office, but he kept me company when I worked during off hours. There were a dozen things he could have been doing on a Saturday morning, like sleeping in for once, but he was there with me.

“Why did I think this was a good idea?” I asked, sighing as I sank into my chair.

“I remember you saying, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘time to make friends with the other werecats.’ Some would take your calls, some wouldn’t. Those who did had more questions than you knew what to do with. There was a lot you couldn’t say over the phone, and having to repeat yourself was frustrating on the third phone call.” Heath leaned on my desk, his black hair falling over his forehead. Weekends meant no product to keep his perfect styling in place. I preferred his weekend hair. “Then you ran off to Mozambique for a short vacation and came back with this idea. Said it would solve all your problems.”

“You make it sound like I went on some grand adventure without you when we both know that wasn’t the case,” I said, smiling. I had run off to Mozambique over the summer, but only for a little while, and nothing dangerous happened. The time I had in Mozambique was now memories I would cherish for centuries to come. I wanted to go back when there was time. I wanted to take him there. Him, Carey, Landon, and Dirk. I knew they would all love it. “All the danger and adventuring were done by the time I was allowed to go. It was a small vacation to see a few of my siblings.” One that hadn’t been planned. Jabari, my eldest brother, had gone through testing and troubling events. By the time I could visit, everything was relatively resolved.

“Where you met your teenage werecat nephew and the unfortunate woman who fell in love with your eldest brother,” Heath reminded me. I couldn’t hold back a laugh. Only three people in my life would ever call Aisha unfortunate—Heath, Landon, and Dirk. Then again, all three men were werewolves, and two of them didn’t particularly like Jabari.

Dirk was just being funny, but Heath and Landon meant it.

“They’re a beautiful family, Heath Everson, and I will not have you throw stones at my brother when we both know how he feels aboutthis. He has a lot of reasons not to support us, but he does, anyway.” I pointed between us, purposefully using my left hand to remind him of the gorgeous ring he’d put on my finger. His chuckle told me it was all in good fun as he lifted his hands in defeat. “Now, back to my bad idea.”

“It’s not a bad idea. It’s just a lot of work, and we’re nearly done.” Heath reached out and took my list, shaking his head as he inspected it. “You know half of this can be done by the werewolves who listen to literally everything I say, right?”

“I can’t have a bunch of stuff that smells like werewolf while I’m hosting roughly a dozen werecats to discuss recent events and the future of our kind,” I reminded him. “I can’t serve drinks that smell like you.”

He raised his brows, giving me a look as if I should have already realized something.

“What?” I demanded.

“You always smell like me.”

“Not that much,” I countered. “And the food…”

“You smell like me as much as I do like you. Our scents have rubbed together so much, there’s no hope of you shaking it by the time they’re here. It’s deep in our clothes. We touch each other’s things too much. The moment you go anywhere, people smell both of us. If you hand them a drink…”

“It will still smell like you,” I said, rubbing my eyes as he made me realize the futility of attempting to be considerate to my coming guests. “I’m just trying to be considerate, taking into account many of them don’t like werewolves and with good reason.”

“They know you have a pack in your territory and that you are in a relationship with the Alpha of that pack. It might seem considerate to some not to use the werewolves to set up this thing you’re doing, but from my side of things, it seems like a step you don’t need to take. It’s a lot of extra work you don’t need. If they don’t feelsafe, they need to stay home and let someone else pass them the information you intend to discuss.”

“Some of them did just that,” I reminded him, looking at another list on my desk. It was by no means a complete list of the werecats in my region of the world, but it was as close as Zuri and I could come, even with help from our other siblings.

“How many have confirmed they’re coming? I know the confirmations have been coming in sporadically, but you haven’t given me an update in a week.”

“Fourteen. Fourteen out of fifty I sent invitations to. The last two were just in the last few days. I would have cast a wider net, but Zuri has hosted these sorts of things before. Werecats are gossips, so you don’t need many of them. They’ll talk to each other and spread the word on their own. Or so I hear. This is lower than she figured it would be, but it won’t be a friendly, relaxed gathering. There are a lot of security issues we have to manage that make most supernaturals wary.”

“Her plane lands tomorrow morning, doesn’t it?” Heath put my list of things to do back on the desk, leaving me to put it where it belonged before it got lost under the rest of the papers.

“Yeah, and she wants to come to the Sunday pack meeting before the week really kicks off so she can get eyes on all of them. If she knows their faces and scents, she’ll be less jumpy if they show up in Dallas. I’ll need you to wrangle the werewolves to keep any fighting from breaking out, especially with her. We both know Fenris would love a crack at one of the twins, and it’s something we can’t afford right now.”

“Already handled. If you want to speak to him yourself, you can, but he’s sworn to me to stay on his property while the werecats are around. He knows the consequences of causing trouble right now. So long as they don’t encroach on him, he’ll stay out of our way.”

“You send him back to Callahan?”

“No.”

I wasn’t entirely surprised when I realized what Heath’s short ‘no’ meant. Heath kept the mad wolf on an incredibly short leash. Fenris was a wild card, a bomb waiting to go off in the otherwise quiet experiment of a werewolf pack in a werecat’s territory. He was stronger than me, something that made me wary. I had kept him, convinced Heath of it, but that didn’t make me blindly trust him or his mental health. Even after several months, I tried not to be alone with Fenris, a feat made easy by my ability to track him around my territory.

Thinking of Fenris, I considered where he was. None of the werewolves were allowed to live outside the territory. I knew where they were at all times if they weren’t out running errands beyond my territory’s border.

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