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His honey-colored eyes darken, losing any of the humor that lingered. “You wouldn’t dare, Ruby. You wouldn’t dare.”
Huh. Maybe if he hadn’t called me Ruby one last time, I would have just run him off like I was planning to. But now?
I gave you that wound, asshole. Time to rub a little salt in it.
“You’re not the Alpha anymore. That means you better get the hell off of Western Pack territory. If you go now, I promise you safe passage for a time, but after that? I just don’t give a shit what happens to you.”
I’m not worried about him sticking around. While most Alpha challenges are to the death, those that end in submission all have the same outcome. The loser beats feet pretty quick otherwise any other wolf could finish the fight if they choose to. And after the way that he treated his packmates and his Betas over the years, I’m sure there are quite a few itching for revenge.
I think about how much it sucked watching Ryker fight a challenge only to turn around and make my mate suffer the same thing.
And then there’s the howl of rage when Elizabeth fell that I know had to belong to Aleks.
Yeah… I don’t have to be the one to kill him. He’s signed his own fate.
He knows it, too.
Still, I’m not ruthless. I can be fair.
“You wanted to keep me here for twenty-five days? I’ll give you twenty-five seconds to get out.” A vicious grin tugs on my lips. “Tick, tock, dickhead.”
He doesn’t need twenty-five seconds. In less than five, he’s shifted to his wolf, back on his paws. With one powerful leap, he clears the pit, bounding over the platform, before racing toward the forest in the distance.
Good freaking riddance.
* * *
I was rightwhen I thought that a few members of the Western Pack would want to see him off. They shift and tear off after him after I count down from twenty-five, and you can bet that it wasn’t to say farewell to the former Alpha.
Though I guessed how they would react, I can’t stop myself from shifting back to my fur and running with them. Ryker catches up, running at my side as we follow after him ourselves, neither one of us willing to take their word for how far Walker get. I’d been burned by believing I could always tell when someone was lying to me before, and I’m not about to let that happen again.
As for Ryker… my mate just wants a piece out of Walker for how he carved me up like a piece of freaking meat during the fight.
We go in our fur, our wolves spurring us on to chase after the disgraced Alpha as if he was the most tempting of prey. The other shifters don’t even dare try and stop us from joining them. Between me and Ryker, the dominance of our wolves keep them from giving Walker any lead if they somehow planned on it.
He doesn’t need one, though. For more than thirty years this has been his territory. He knows every rock, every stick, every dip in the terrain. He knows where to use the river to his advantage, muddying the scent trail so that all we could do was be sure that he’d darted into the old Lakeview Pack land.
He knows how to escape in one piece.
And, honestly, I expected something like that. When I showed him the tiniest hint of mercy, taking his pack instead of taking his life, my bio-dad would’ve known that he needed to haul his furry ass as far away from us as possible. If we caught up with him again… well, Ryker hadn’t been the one to give him safe passage out of the district.
With a feral snarl, Ryker orders the handful of wolves flanking us to continue the chase. My wolf adds a yip for good measure before the two of us turn tail and head back. At the very least, there are plenty of shocked shifters who just watched their Alpha be defeated. Our alpha natures demanded we deal with that—not to mention, we still had packmates of ours that needed to be rescued.
We pad back to the pit in our fur, shifting to our skin when we rejoin the still-milling crowd so that we can address the worried shifters. Before we do, though, Ryker pulls me to the side, telling me that I should go pack while he deals with the Western Pack.
He wants us gone by evening.
He also wants to keep me out of sigh to the upset shifters.
Uh. That’s gonna be a no.
So, as charming as ever, I tell him to bite me. Not the best comeback, especially to a male whose mark I proudly wear, but still. I got us into this mess. I’ll stand with him while we do our best to clean it up.
No point dancing around it. The Western Pack needs a leader. I’m the one who has the best claim to it, but I also made it clear during the challenge that I don’t freaking want it. But I sure as hell don’t want Walker to try and slink back and take it over again, either.
The solution? It has to be disbanded. I know that. Ryker does, too. The community is too far removed from the rest of the shifter world anyway.
It has to come to this.
