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I jolted, looking toward the dark figure, and my blood went as cold as the snow beneath my feet.
Standing across the garden, with a cigarette in his pale hand, was none other than Curt Fowler.
He looked over at me and gave me a smirk. “Can we talk?” he asked.
I clenched the flyers in my hands and let out a huge sigh, drawing the phone away from my ear and tapping the end-call button.
Chapter 7
Cole
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I fished it out, seeing that Marley was calling. I clicked the button on the side of my phone twice to stop the ringing without sending her straight to voicemail. I’d call her back as soon as I was able.
It’d been a long day in the Georgia Pack. Noah was having a blast, but it meant getting roped into a lot of activities that didn’t immediately pertain to the things we had to handle. He was finally in bed, exhausted after a day of fun and play and new things. My grandfather had come over to the townhome he’d set us up with and helped me get him ready for bed. I’d made dinner, giving Gramps a chance to get to know Noah a little better.
Now it was quieter in the house, and we were just grandfather and grandson sitting in the living room with a couple of beers and a fire burning in the fireplace.
“Pup’s a handful,” he remarked as I sat down on the sofa and heaved out a long, tired sigh.
“Yeah,” I said. “I keep thinking it’s going to get easier as he gets older, that he’ll finally run out of energy and chill out, but it only seems to be getting worse.”
I handed him one of the beers, and he gave me a nod of thanks before twisting the cap off. “It usually levels out in the teen years, at least from what I’ve seen,” he said.
“When you say teen years, do you mean thirteen?”
He laughed and shook his head. “If only. More like fifteen, seventeen.”
I heaved out another long sigh and sank down into my seat. “I know I shouldn’t be praying for time to go by any faster, but I feel like I’m going to lose the ability to keep up with him,” I admitted.
“Well, that’s what’s nice about having a mate and a pack,” he said. “They do say it takes a village, right? When you’re worn out, you can just ask for a little bit of help from someone who’s got the energy.”
“Within reason, I suppose,” I mused.
“How is she, by the way? Your mate. I was hoping to see Marley again.”
“She’s good,” I said. “She’s at home, running a pack meeting right now. She just gave me a call, but I’ll call her back later.”
“You sure? What if something’s wrong?”
I shook my head. “No, we have a code for that. If it was dire, she would have sent me a code red when I didn’t answer or call again in quick succession. I’ve been working on not micromanaging her or worrying too much about her. She’s been getting on me about sharing the workload, and I’m trying to learn how to rely on people a little more.”
“That’s good,” Gramps said. “It took me a while to figure that out myself. On one hand, it’s usually coming from a place of wanting to take care of everyone. But it can also be a bit of an ego thing.”
“Ego thing?” I asked. “How so?”
He shrugged. “It’s a really common pitfall for new alphas to think that they have to be present for every important thing. That everything will fall apart if they don’t at least do some part of the work. But the truth is, most of your pack members are going to be really damned competent if you’ve recruited right. That’s the whole point—to have a team you can rely on to run things the way they ought to be run when you’re not there, breathing down their necks.”
I nodded. “I see. Yeah, I can see how it might be a bit of perfectionism now that you’re putting it that way. Or even a desire to not feel disposable.”
My grandfather nodded, taking a swig of his beer. “Well, anyway, probably ought to talk about the important stuff while we don’t have a screaming five-year-old running around. You said you wanted to pick my brain about pack warfare, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Honestly, I didn’t take the threat seriously enough, and now I’m worried I’m out of my depth.”
“How severe is it getting?”
“Last week, Curt came and threw thousands of sheets of propaganda all over our property, trying to win our pack members over to his side and giving us a hell of a cleanup to worry about. Hasn’t been much more than that, but I want to have a strategy in my back pocket. I mean, frankly, I don’t even know what pack wars are like,” I admitted. “Are we talking full-on battlefields and stuff?”
“Sometimes,” Gramps said with a shrug. “Sometimes, it’s more like an effort at sabotage or an undermining.”
