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Always keep your pack in line, or else you risk losing them to apathy.
Heading through the back door, he heard voices coming from the front of the house and made his way to them. He called out.
“In here!” he heard his sister, Nina, say.
Following her voice, he stepped into the family room. It was a quaint room with a rounded section that could hold at least ten bodies. Off to the side sat large windows overlooking the front of their property … easy for anyone sitting in there to know when someone was coming to their front door.
The coming and goings of his pack were frequent and rotating. Since Owen’s father was the alpha, they usually got plenty of irritating house calls to keep the front part of the house busy at all hours of the day, including midnight calls that were never fun.
Couldn’t others deal with themselves until after breakfast? He didn’t know how his father had the patience to put up with others. If he were alpha, he’d make office hours from ten in the morning to about three, then take the rest of the day off. That was the way to live it up.
In the front room, Owen’s sister grinned at him, swinging her legs over the side of the couch opposite of where their father, Dernet, sat, a cane clutched in his hands. “What are you up to? You look sweaty.”
He rolled his eyes at her. “Working. Unlike someone …”
She waved him off. “Not my day to do runs.”
“Yeah, I see that.”
“Owen,” his father cut in, steering their conversation back to business, “how were the border checks?”
He felt his shoulders straighten automatically, his chin tilting up.
Dernet had always had an intimidating presence, even if he didn’t mean to come across that way. The current alpha of their pack had been raised in a time of turmoil and need that had set a precedent for all of them. He kept the pack’s livelihood together through tough love and an iron fist. Neither of which were needed nowadays.
This didn’t exactly translate well to parenting. Getting trained directly under a respected alpha was more important than having a loving father-son relationship.
“They went well. Nothing to report.” He and the other malesdidcheck the perimeter … as they raced past it.
His father nodded. “Good to hear. Any word on the Lovell pack?”
Owen shook his head. “None.” He barely kept himself from rolling his eyes at the question. Who gave a shit what the Lovell pack was doing? Live and let live was his philosophy. It was too much work to keep up with every damn wolf outside of the pack.
“Good,” his father replied.
Owen tucked his arms behind his back as casually and naturally as he could. He always had a bad habit of twisting his fingers together whenever apprehension got the better of him. It was the one tell his father had always pointed out and reprimanded him over.An alpha showing any kind of weakness to his pack is doomed to fail,a line that was constantly repeated to him growing up. So, in order to break it, he hid it.
Unfortunately for him, his sister was much better at reading him than their father was. “Sooo, what are you up to today?”
Owen glanced at her pointedly. She gave him an innocent smile. He then mumbled, “Actually … I’m going to be heading out soon.”
His father raised an eyebrow. “To?”
He kept his face neutral. “Into town.”
An awkward silence hung in the air so long that Nina had to clear her throat dramatically to break them out of it.
“I see.”
“I’ll be back soon,” he quickly amended. “Just meeting up with some of the other males.”
“Hmm. Hurry back then. There’s no need to stay out all night long.”
He nodded. “Of course.”
Without another word, Dernet turned back to speak with Nina again, dismissing him in that infamous way of his. Awkwardly, Owen stepped back and headed out the front door, not wanting to drag another conversation out of either of them. He loved his father, but the man was so out of touch with today’s world. All the old man focused on was the pack. That was not the kind of alpha Owen wanted to be. He wasn’t concerned with family dynamics as much as his own good time.
Owen jogged into the forest away from the house, slipping off his sweats and tucking them into one of the hidey-holes his family used. He shifted into his wolf form and took off through the trees, sprinting until his heart thundered in his chest.
