The Deputy and His Enforcer (Kincaid Pack #3) - Kiki Clark Page 0,14
between V and Fiona about the success of the first mentorship meeting and ideas for future classes.
The original idea for the program had actually been Jamie Foley’s. He was now Rick’s personal assistant and managed the manor alongside the housekeeper, Beth Wilkins, but before that, he’d come to a pack meeting and suggested starting something that allowed packmates to acquire mentors. It had been a terrific idea, so Marcus and V had run with it.
Jamie probably should have been at the first meeting earlier that week, but he and Marcus weren’t… on the best of terms at the moment. When Jamie had first started working for Rick, Marcus had thought he’d finally found an ally, someone who was also from a more traditional pack and would help him convince the others who worked in and around the manor to use Rick’s proper title and follow pack and shifter laws more stringently.
He’d been wrong.
It wasn’t that Jamie wasn’t a traditionalist like Marcus—he was, to an extent. But unlike Marcus, he’d stepped into his job, looked around at what was happening, and then… rolled with it, as Nico had called it. Instead of pushing formalities for pack business, he’d begun offering suggestions on ways to adapt the pack’s laws to better suit their forward-thinking alpha.
Things had come to a head when Jamie had changed some of the traditional events the pack held at the Harvest Festival a few weeks ago. When Marcus had found out, he and Jamie had gotten into a heated discussion about it. Rick had, of course, sided with Jamie and then reprimanded Marcus when he’d resisted working with Jamie on the archive project.
After the Council—a group of retired alphas who governed and punished packs when necessary—had failed to condemn another alpha for spying on a Kincaid Pack emissary, Rick had asked Marcus to begin digging into the Council archives, which were accessible to any pack in good standing. Since Bennett and his mate, Kieran, had stormed out of an official Council hearing, they’d all been worried that the Council would retaliate since they obviously had more enemies than friends sitting on the Council.
Not long after that, Kieran’s father—the same alpha who had spied on them—attempted to overthrow Rick by attacking the pack. By the end of the encounter, one of McAllister’s Enforcers was dead and most of the members had joined the Kincaid Pack, resulting in the McAllister Pack ceasing to exist in any real way and further complicating the Kincaid Pack’s relationship with the Council. Even though they had every right to defend themselves from an invading pack, Marcus was worried that the Council would take exception to Rick’s lack of diplomacy in addition to his second-in-command storming a hearing and dragging a witness away.
The entire situation was a mess, and Rick wanted to know what the Council might do if they decided to make an example of him or the pack. Marcus… didn’t like guessing, but he’d given his best answer and then been told to start reviewing the archives. And to use Nico’s help.
And Jamie’s.
Luckily, since the last hundred years of journals, hearing transcripts, and Council meeting minutes were all digitized, they hadn’t had to spend much time together as they worked on the project. They’d split up the years, then worked in separate spaces, though Nico often chose to bring his laptop into Marcus’s office when he was reviewing his assigned years.
After several weeks, they didn’t have much more information than they’d begun with, but there were centuries more of journals, minutes, and transcripts still in hard copy form in Montana within the Council’s compound. The question was how to gain access to them.
Within half an hour, everyone had finished eating and begun breaking up to spend the rest of their Saturday evening either relaxing or working on pack business. All of the pack Enforcers were in attendance at dinner. They used to only eat together sometimes, but since Rick’s mating, he’d become more insistent about them sharing meals and spending other time together that wasn’t work related.
Bennett’s mate and Jamie sometimes ate with them too, but lately they’d chosen to eat earlier with the other residents of the manor since the table wasn’t large enough for everyone. While Kieran’s father had been busy attacking Rick, Kieran had traveled back home and brought back dozens of refugees—members of what used to be the McAllister Pack who’d chosen to join the Kincaid Pack and get away from McAllister and his abusive Enforcers.