Page 23 of Pack’s Prize

I hopped down from the stool in search of a glass. There was a long walnut sideboard against one wall of the living room, with a mismatched selection of glassware on top. Above it was one of the oversized abstract paintings that covered the walls, this one in rich greens and browns that reminded me of dappled sunlight on trees. It was beautiful, somehow both peaceful and lively, and as I stared at it, empty wine glass in hand, it seemed to move.Leaves flickering in and out of shadow.

“Who did these paintings?” I asked. “An artist your gallery, um, represents?” I didn’t know the terminology. I’d need to study up if I wanted to appear knowledgeable. If the estate asked me about art and I knew literally nothing, I didn’t know if they’d be suspicious, but at the very least it would be embarrassing forme.

“Hmm? Oh, those are Theo’s.”

Theo’s.

“Oh,” I managed, tearing my eyes away from the mesmerizing shimmer of leaves in front of me to look at the collection as a whole. There had to be a dozen of them, all larger than my arm span, and all dense with abstract color. “I thought you said he was–” what was it? “Curator, or something.”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “He hasn’t painted in a long time. He’s too busy running the gallery with me. But he’s an artist first. I mean,” he grinned, “just look at him.”

He was right–the alpha didn’t have the look of the alphas that I knew. He was big, of course, and muscular, but not like Elias, whose shoulders looked like they could lift a school bus, if you asked him nicely enough. Michael had turned his attention back to the pot, but a smile lingered on his face, around his eyes. I’d never seen him like this, so relaxed. He was in his element, in his home, doing something he seemed to enjoy, and I understood, with a relationship like these three alphas had, howguardedhe probably was any time they were in public. Especially as pack alpha. Even if their pack was unconventional, all alphas felt a sense of duty to their pack. It was part biology and part the way they were socialized. A blessing and a burden, just as being an omega was.

“He’s an amazing portraitist, too; although he hasn’t done one in a long time, I’ve seen some of his older paintings, the more realistic stuff, and he’s talented. I’d put him in our gallery, and we don’t take just anyone.”

“Why do you want the business–the one you need me to inherit, I mean–if you already have the gallery?” It didn’t seem like they were hurting for money; just the opposite. I crossed back to the kitchen island, and poured myself a glass of wine from another subtly labeled, not-from-the-discount-grocery-store bottle of wine.

Michael turned away from the pot slowly, watching as the red wine cascaded from the neck of the bottle into my glass. Finally, he sighed.

“Pride,” he said simply. “That business is rightfully mine. If it doesn’t come to me, it will go to some cousin who will just sell it and donate the money to the Send Billionaires on Vacations to Space Research Fund.” He rolled his eyes.

I smirked. “You don’t want to go to space?”

“Not really,” he said.He didn’t deny the billionaire part, though, did he,I thought. Then again, we were drinking expensive wine in a penthouse right in the heart of downtown. You’dhaveto be a billionaire to afford a palace like this one, even if the decor looked less like a typical billionaire penthouse and more like a bohemian loft. He shrugged, looking around at his warm kitchen scented with spices, his house full of art, then held up his wine glass to me. “I have everything I need right here.”

I clinked my own against it before taking a sip, the flavor rich and jammy.

Surely it was the wine–and not the way that Michael’s eyes seemed to rest so heavily on my own–that made my belly warm and my cheeks flush.

CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR

Michael

Why didI want the business?

Why, indeed.

The business itself was of no interest to me: a small collection of people moving money back and forth in a dreary office on the edge of the nice part of the city. I had never had any interest in its function, its profits, its purpose, besides making my family increasingly wealthy, generation to generation.

But what it represented…

I’d known even before I officially presented what was expected of me: get a good job in something safe, like business, or finance. Find a nice omega. Settle down in a pack. Inherit the family business when my grandfather passed away.

All that had changed when the man had walked in on me and a friend in a… compromising position.

A male friend.

Analphafriend.

It could have just as easily been an omega, or a beta even, whom he’d chanced upon me with–it wasn’t that I wasuninterestedin omegas, just that I had beentoointerested in… everyone else.

But it had been an alpha.

Unforgivable.

I had been lucky, in a way: my only family cutting me loose meant that I had been free to do what I wanted to. Sure, I still got that business degree, but I minored in art, and instead of getting a boring internship as my college peers had done, I’d taken my trust–the man wasn’tthatcruel–and spent the next decade traveling the globe, dabbling in art.

And men.

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