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Andrew started to protest, but he met Ryder’s eyes, then looked down and away in submission. Ryder nodded once. “You can do it,” he said. “They look to you as a leader.”
“And the other dorm?” Andrew asked.
“I was thinking Miles?” Ryder said. Andrew shook his head.
“He went to his grandfather’s place,” Andrew said. “He got a call earlier.”
“Recommendations, then?” Ryder didn’t let his surprise show. But why was Jessie wanting Miles? He checked his mate bond. There was no agitation, so he thought everything was fine. Well, that was their next stop.
Andrew gave him a couple of names. He looked around the room and grimaced. Ryder figured that meant Andrew agreed with his own assessment. There weren’t any leaders here.
Ryder went outside, Benny at his right shoulder. It already felt strange not to have Jessie at his left. “We need to get Jessie,” Ryder said. He stretched the kinks out of his back. And they were short on guards again. He’d left two of his wolves to take control of the men at that last house. And two were at the first house. Two here. And now there was just Benny at his back. Well, if he had to have just one man with him, this was the one to have.
It felt good to be on his bike for even the short ride to Duncan McKenzie’s place. It helped him to focus, to quiet all the thoughts in his head, the list of all the things he needed to take care of. You focused on the road, on the bike, on the muscles you used to control your bike — and yourself.
He shook his head at the size of the house, but apparently, it had been full to the max at one point. The gate opened for them, and he and Benny rode in. You practically needed a bike just to get from the gate to the house, Ryder thought with amusement.
It was a very different kind of house from what he’d grown up in. His mother had a three-bedroom cottage in Okanogan where she could walk to the school. It was on a typical-sized lot, and she gardened that space to the hilt. Fresh vegetables and flowers in all the colors possible. It had been plenty for the three of them — until his father had to fake his death when Ryder was 14.
His father had his own house up in the Okanogan hills — a cabin he’d built for himself and Benny when they’d come to the region after Cambodia. Ryder had spent a lot of time up there. But it was a log cabin with a main room and bedroom downstairs and a loft upstairs that Ryder used as a bedroom — as Benny had before him. The best feature was the big front porch that overlooked a slope that lead down to a valley below. You could watch the sunrise there if you were so inclined. Ryder had always liked the cabin, in part because you could see where his father had started building it and improved his skills as he went. The kitchen floor was a bit wonky, but the front room floor was smooth and level. He’d spent a lot of time as a kid tracing those changes throughout the house —a house his father built with his own hands. He’d been very proud to have a father like that.
This place was a showcase for a wealthy man, and in its own way just as revealing of the man who owned it as either his mother’s or his father’s places. Ryder considered that and wondered what kind of man the pack house would reveal the old Alpha to have been. Was there another side to that man?
Jessie greeted him inside the door, and he pulled her up close and kissed her deeply. She held onto him tightly for a moment. So tightly, he wondered if something was wrong. He felt her amusement at that thought, and he grinned at her. “So no? You’re just glad to see me?” he teased.
“I am,” she said solemnly with laughter lurking in her eyes. “And how was your day?”
It cracked him up, because how the hell would you begin to describe it? “Interesting,” he said, still laughing. “And yours?”
“Also interesting,” Jessie replied. “You do know that’s a Chinese curse?”
“All right, kids,” Benny said. “We’re running late. Who all are we taking out to the pack house for supper, and who’s driving? And you do know that ‘May you live in interesting times’ is not a Chinese curse? Robert F. Kennedy made it famous calling it one.”
“Well I guess he’d know,” Ryder muttered. “He most certainly lived in interesting times.”
Benny rolled his eyes, and Ryder grinned. He was feeling all too good with Jessie in his arms.
“Come on,” Jessie said. “I’d show you around, but it would take too long. But we’ve got a cabin out back. There are enough for the Wolves too.” She frowned. “Where are they?”
“Supervising the herds of boys we seem to have collected throughout the day,” Benny answered, a bit sourly. “How are the women?”
Jessie shrugged slightly. “About what you’d expect,” she answered. “But Amanda and Cass seem to be able to hold it together enough to help the others. And having Miles here is a help.”
Ryder frowned at her. “It is?”
She nodded. “Tell you later,” she promised. She lead them into a book-lined study that either of his parents would have killed for. Benny made a beeline for the shelves. Add his brother to that list, he guessed. Ryder wasn’t much of a reader to his mother’s despair. His father had just shrugged. You’ve got time, he’d said once. When you run into things you can’t understand, you may find a new interest in books. I won’t guarantee that you’ll find answers in them, but there’s a solace in knowing that others have had the same questions you do.
Maybe there were answers to his current growing list of questions to be found in books, if he had time to read them. Someday, he might see if there were. But he didn’t think there was going to be an answer of what did you do with a shifter pack in crisis, a bunch of young, bewildered wolves, and eight women who had been kidnapped and abused. They deserved justice, he thought, but he had a hard time reconciling that with those bewildered men.
Maybe because they were the weapons used by more powerful men, he thought suddenly, a thought that made him want to kill someone.
Kill, his wolf agreed.
Later, Ryder promised, and he felt his wolf’s satisfaction that a day of reckoning would come all too soon.
“Do I have time for a shower?” he asked Jessie. She shook her head.
“They eat early here —7 p.m.,” Jessie said. “We’re running late.”
