Alpha. Rachel Vincent

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СКАЧАТЬ the unwelcome warmth leaching into my leg from Dean’s as Councilman Blackwell called for the official vote.

      It would be an open, vocal vote, for something this big. Each Alpha’s decision would go down on record. We might have actually pulled it off, if they’d used closed ballots. If the weaker of Malone’s allies—Nick Davidson seemed less than solidly on board—didn’t have to face him during the procedure, or admit that they’d switched sides.

      Or if Blackwell had voted. But he stuck to his guns, shaky though his aim was.

      One by one, they went around the table, and each Alpha said a name. My father and Malone were excluded, and Blackwell removed himself from the proceedings.

      The vote started with Milo Mitchell, whose son Kevin had been exiled by my father, then killed by Marc. “My vote goes to Calvin Malone.” No surprise there.

      Next came Umberto Di Carlo, across the table from Mitchell. “I support Greg Sanders.”

      Then Jerald Pierce, who had two sons—Parker and Holden—in the south-central Pride, and had just lost his oldest, Lance, to the thunderbird justice system. “Malone.” I wanted to shake him and ask how he could side with one son over the others. Especially considering that Lance’s cowardice had cost two other lives, and almost cost many more.

      After Pierce came my uncle Rick Wade, my mother’s brother. “Greg Sanders has my vote, and my unyielding support.” I wanted to cry.

      Wes Gardner, whose brother Jamey had been killed in our territory by Manx, voted with a single word. “Malone.”

      Aaron Taylor, whose daughter we’d saved from being kidnapped and sold in the Amazon, showed his loyalty by voting for my father.

      And finally came Nick Davidson, and for a moment, I thought he’d falter. I thought he was seeing the light at the last minute. Then he closed his eyes and sighed. And said, “Calvin Malone.”

      And just like that, justice died without so much as a whimper of pain. Four votes to three. If Blackwell had voted, he could have forced a tie and bought us time. But he went with his conscience, and as inconvenient as that turned out for the south-central Pride, a part of me respected him for sticking to his guns, regardless of the consequences.

      Yet there was another part of me that wanted to choke him where he stood.

      And suddenly I understood something my father had been trying to teach me for almost a year: sometimes you have to do the wrong thing for the right reason in order to truly make a difference.

      I’d come close to understanding that with Lance Pierce, when we’d had to turn him over to save Kaci. But in a span of ten minutes, by simply refusing to act, Paul Blackwell had driven home a point my father hadn’t been able to make me see in all my time as an enforcer.

      The world isn’t black and white, good or bad. The battles that make a real difference are fought in the murky area in between, where the greater good requires brutal sacrifice. Where both the means and the ends are just shadows in a featureless gray landscape.

      And that was the death of my idealism.

      

      Jace followed Marc out the front door by less than a second, and they glanced around in unison, both looking for me. Temporarily united in their common concern. They found me leaning against the wall to the left of the front porch, and their identical expressions of relief would have been funny, if we hadn’t just seen justice strangled by the steel-gloved fist of oppression.

      Melodramatic? Maybe. But also accurate. Calvin Malone couldn’t even define integrity, much less uphold it.

      “You okay?” Jace jogged down the steps first, but neither made any move to touch me, so we stood there like the first three kids at a junior high dance, unsure who should make the first move.

      “No. That did not just happen.” I sniffled in the cold.

      Jace shoved both hands into his pockets, probably to keep from reaching for me. We all needed someone to either hold or punch, but neither of them would cause any more trouble, after what we’d just witnessed. “No one’s less thrilled about seeing Calvin in charge than I am.”

      “Don’t bet on that,” Marc mumbled, leaning against the cabin wall beside me, only a few inches away this time. “His first act as council chair will be finding a way to get rid of me.”

      “That won’t be easy.” Jace sat on the top step, facing us. “This is a pretty damn hostile takeover, and he’s gonna have Faythe’s dad, her uncle, Bert Di Carlo, and Aaron Taylor fighting him every step of the way. Which means that for even a simple majority—that vital six out of ten votes—he’s gonna need Blackwell.”

      Marc kicked a pinecone across the dead grass. “Paul Blackwell isn’t going to lift a finger to keep me here, even knowing what Malone tried to do to us.”

      “Yes, he will,” I insisted, grasping for the silver lining surely edging the storm cloud that had just rolled over us. “Blackwell may not be openminded or progressive, but if Malone forgets to cross one single T, the old man will vote against him. In fact, I bet Blackwell will be looking for legitimate reasons to go anti-Malone.”

      Marc shrugged. “So Malone will do what he always does—hide his personal agenda within some technically valid, if morally repugnant, new proposition. Either way, he’s going to make our lives hell.”

      “I know.” There was no way around that. And I’d be next on his list of lives to ruin. Experience had already shown us that Malone was willing to do anything to marry off as many of his sons as possible into Prides where they could later become Alphas, thus putting a considerable piece of the territorial pie under his own paw. He’d already mentally paired me with Alex, his oldest son, now that Brett was dead. And I had no doubt that he’d use our trespass onto his territory to get rid of Marc and try to blackmail me into a position that would better benefit him.

      Jace would be harder to dispose of. He was neither a stray nor a shrew, and he wasn’t technically guilty of trespassing, because he’d been invited by his mother, to mourn his brother’s death with the rest of the family.

      But we all knew Malone would kill Jace if the opportunity presented itself. After killing his own firstborn son, taking out the stepson he’d never liked in the first place wouldn’t even faze him. Especially if it could be written off as self-defense, or somehow otherwise justifiable.

      Jace sighed, and his warm puff of breath was visible in the glow from the porch light. “There has to be a way around this. We’re screwed so long as Cal’s in charge.”

      “So let’s get him fired,” I whispered, to guard against eavesdroppers. I pushed myself away from the wall, clinging to the only bit of hope I could see on the horizon, far-fetched though it was. “Let’s go back to the Flight and snag a witness. Now, before Malone has a chance to come up with some reason to outlaw thunderbird testimony. We already know Blackwell’s not going to support him on that one.”

      “But do we really want to squander our best asset on testimony?” Marc asked, his voice as soft as mine.

      The thunderbirds owed me a favor for saving the life of one of their young when Lance Pierce took her hostage in a last-ditch effort to save himself. And they were eager to remove themselves from my debt. But we’d been saving that favor, planning to ask СКАЧАТЬ