Page 99 of The SnowFang Storm

Kyle had handed me a bunch of edge pieces to my shitty life puzzle. Daniel had been my father’s Beta when my mother had been alive. I could have understood if he’d murdered or challenged my father. But he’d gone after me. I’d been little more than a child. I’d been defenseless, helpless, and no threat at all to him except he didn’t think he was big enough to take on Rodero of SilverPaw directly.

Coward. Sniveling bottom-feeding coward.

I ran my hands over my battered face and looked down at the miserable, dirty city. “I can’t believe my father didn’t know.”

“I’m sure he did.” Sterling smoothed his hand down the small of my back, gently, mindful of the painful welts.

I shoved my hands into the pockets of my long coat.

I pulled out a handful of MoonDark edible packets.

“I see the GranitePaw Alpha is something of a master of sleight of hand,” Sterling said, unamused.

I clenched my hand and yanked my arm back.

“No.” Sterling grabbed my wrist before I flung them off the building. He took the packets from me and put them in his own pocket.

The MoonDark clouded my nose. This shitty, shitty concrete forest. Those edibles probably were a better compounding, probably fewer side effects, but the asshole! “How much of what he said was a lie? I can’t smell anything.”

“I believe every word that came out of their mouths, and I don’t trust any of it. It was all the truth as they see it.”

That moment when being lied to would have been preferable to the truth. We’d been fed lies and lines and half-truths for so damn long my palette just couldn’t accept some good quality truth-telling.

GranitePaw had offered us everything. Including a high prestige position within GranitePaw for Sterling, and a potential route for me to one of the most powerful positions in our species.

It also felt as appealing as staring down an angry bull moose.

Sterling scratched his jaw. “They don’t know everything. They don’t know how I formed SnowFang. They don’t know about AmberHowl. So what are the odds they’re working with FrostFur?”

“The only thing those packs would agree to would be a fight to the death.”

“Any chance they know about FrostFur? Assuming there’s something to know.”

“They’d have to get told the information from a very highly placed source, assuming my father even told Daniel what the meeting was about. And if you think my father knew what Daniel said—”

“I’m sure Rodero did.”

“Then my father would have known Daniel couldn’t be trusted, and he would not have risked telling him anything.”

“Then perhaps AmberHowl whispered to GranitePaw.”

“I’m not saying they wouldn’t, but why would they? What can the GranitePaw do for AmberHowl worth that prestige exchange and the risk of whispering about a secret Council meeting?” GranitePaw was going for elevation, so any of the existing Elder Packs, or any of the packs competing for elevation, would be very careful doing anything that would benefit GranitePaw’s political and prestige bottomline. Still, it was possible those two packs were working together.

Sterling pondered, and said, “She-wolves.”

“She-wolves,” I echoed.

“What Maya told you,” he said. “If it wasn’t an exaggeration, the cities host a trove of she-wolves who choose not to pursue their mates, and there aren’t any packs in the cities with Alphas who can compel it to happen. It would explain a possible AmberHowl/GranitePaw link.”

I frowned. “That’s a hell of an interesting theory, and I’m not saying it’s wrong. But the GranitePaw also want to leave Manhattan at a critical time for their pack. They want to go for elevation at the same time they’d be leaving their base of power. Their entire pack, their culture, their skills are all adapted to living in the city.”

“Agreed. If they were a business asking me to invest, I’d tell them they were insane.”

“And they want us gone from it at the same time they tell us to join up,” I said.

He nodded to this. “That demand came with menace. I know that scent anywhere.”

I cocked my head. “This city is the only major city where wanderers are an infestation. There are no other packs in the modern era who have originated in a major city and rose to anything resembling prestige, and at the same time, this city used to be home to some smaller packs, but in the past few years, they’ve all left.”

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