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“Shift,” Ryder ordered. He rocked back onto his heels to give her space. “You’re safe here. I am your Alpha, and I will keep you safe.”
And there was a shivering girl on the couch. “Here,” Jessie said, and handed him some bacon. “Get her to eat this.”
Ryder fed her the bacon, and then Jessie handed him a glass of milk. The girl drank it obediently.
“What’s your name?” Jessie asked gently.
“Sharon,” she said hoarsely. Benny got her some water, and Ryder helped her drink it. “Sharon Campbell.”
Benny was staring at her. He recognized her, Ryder thought.
“Did someone do this to you because you warned me last night?” he demanded.
Ryder glanced at him. This was the girl?
“She’s the one who whispered ‘treachery’ to me in the kitchen,” Benny said tersely.
Jessie came back into the room and gave the girl a T-shirt and sweatpants.
“Let me check her over first,” Dennis murmured. “How about you all clear out for a moment? Jessie, you could stay if you would.”
Ryder followed Benny out the door. “Campbell,” he observed. “Interesting how that name keeps coming up.”
Duncan joined them, coming in from the kitchen. “I heard,” he said. “Is she going to be OK?”
“Physically? Sure,” Benny said, and there was bitterness in his voice. “How many more women are going to be damaged in this pack, McKenzie?”
Duncan shook his head. “I doubt you could find one over the age of 16 who wasn’t already hurt,” he said tiredly. “I protected me and mine. And shame on me for not thinking of all the others. But I assumed the other families were doing the same.”
“Like what was happening to John’s family?” Benny shot back. “Those scared women and children lurking upstairs?”
Scared, and scarred, Ryder thought. He hadn’t said anything last night, and he wasn’t going to bring it up today either. Thank God, Dennis had warned them or he would have lost it last night. But sometime soon that would need to be addressed.
“What do you want from me, Garrison? A pound of flesh? Well, take it then,” Duncan shouted.
“Easy,” Ryder ordered, and both of them subsided. His eyes narrowed as he assessed them. He grimaced. They were nearly equal in strength. When that happened, there was always the desire to test who was the most dominant. He was surprised they hadn’t gone at it before.
Did that make Duncan more dominant than he was? Benny was. Benny always tamped it down when he rode with Ryder and his Wolves, but Benny was definitely more dominant. And it was impressive that he had the kind of control that let him to cede power to Ryder.
Ryder thought about the challenge fight, and the shared power and dominance with Jessie that had allowed him to refuse to submit to John McKenzie’s dominance. With all that had happened since, he hadn’t had time to think about the implications of that. Win the challenge, check. Stay alive, also check. But think through what happened? No, he hadn’t had that kind of time.
Besides, he didn’t think he’d ever heard of such a thing before Benny told him. He needed to get Benny to tell him more. He sighed. Getting Benny to spill information could be a frustrating experience. Benny either told you something or he didn’t.
And Ryder suspected in this case, Benny didn’t know anything more than what he had already told him. He knew of a couple, close in dominance and with a mate bond, who had essentially merged that dominance and power in a fight.
And that seemed to describe what had happened between him and Jessie. It had felt amazing, really. Two people bonded, working together like that? Hard to describe what that felt like.
But it had also allowed him to win a dominance fight against a man who was actually more dominant than he was. Ryder wasn’t going to fret about the fairness of that — John McKenzie needed to die. And everything he’d learned since then told him the pack would have been better off if he’d died decades ago. No, he’d take the win, no matter how he got it.
But it could be a problem if there were others like Duncan who might actually be more dominant than he was. How did you run a pack if you weren’t the most dominant wolf in it?
Not a problem at all,Jessie said through their mate bond from the other room.We’re a team, remember?
Listening again. He hoped she was right. He wasn’t going to share any of this with anyone else, however, not even Benny. Could you run a pack as a team?
He guessed he was going to find out. He took a deep breath and blew it out. “Duncan? How many wolves in the pack are more dominant than you are?” he asked quietly.
Benny’s eyes widened, and then he got the blank expression on his face that said he’d gone into intelligencer mode. Maybe if Benny realized why Duncan bugged him, he could back off. He was asking a lot of Benny. Everyone asked a lot of Benny Garrison. Ryder chewed on his cheek as he thought about that.
