a lifetime of practice at ignoring his bossy older sister. Nola excelled at telling other people what to do, especially when she didn’t have to do anything herself. She’d been great at making plans for his life when he was the one who sacrificed freedom and happiness in service to the pack, yet always seemed to disappear when the pack required anything of her.
He shook away the unkind thoughts as he finally ended the call. She was just trying to do the best she could with what she had. It wasn’t either of their faults that Ma had married a vicious son of a bitch after their father died and Henry was too young to take the pack. No one would have listened to a four-year-old alpha, regardless of how much the pack loved his father. No one knew how bad Ulrich was until it was too late.
Henry growled to himself and paced through the garden as he struggled to soothe his agitated wolf side. Part of him wanted to fix all the problems he’d left behind in Montana, but the rest of him knew it wasn’t his fight. It wasn’t his job. The pack could have overthrown Ulrich, but no one had the stones to work together to deal with it. They looked to Henry, a half-grown kid, to challenge the huge, cruel alpha. He bared his teeth at nothing in the garden, wishing he had someone to fight, and kept moving. He’d tried. He’d challenged Ulrich and thought maybe he could have succeeded—but ended up getting his ass brutally kicked.
Brutally. It almost killed him.
He still carried the scars. He’d run a few years later, though those intervening years had been a living hell at Ulrich’s hands, when the bastard took every opportunity to remind Henry that he’d been beaten. Henry recovered eventually, though the mental scars remained, even after finding Miles Evershaw and his cousin Todd and their pack of misfits.
Henry cut off a growl when he caught Cricket high-stepping through the shaggy grass in the backyard giving him a disdainful look. The cat sneezed in his general direction and continued on his way on whatever cat business Cricket was up to. Henry’s wolf side wasn’t about to keep bellyaching when a regular house cat judged him for it. He just had to get his shit together and deal with the new family drama.
Knowing Nola like he did, Henry didn’t expect her to give up so easily. She had a one-track mind when she had a goal. Which would have made her a great alpha, if she’d stood up and taken on the leadership role. He headed for the house, scowling fiercely enough that even Silas, one of the rougher misfits they’d collected in the pack over the years, got out of his way.
Henry didn’t bother to turn around. “Need to hunt some wolves. You up for it?”
Silas grunted, “Yeah. I’ll get the others,” and headed off to get the rest of the team.
Henry cracked his knuckles and rotated his head until his neck popped. Maybe he’d get a chance to fight after all.
Chapter 11
Ophelia
It didn’t take me long to decide. I didn’t get a weird vibe from Deirdre like I had with other witches, and she was upfront enough that I figured I’d know pretty quickly if things weren’t working out. I just needed a day or two to come up with a plan for how to deal with Rocko, and then I could move on.
It helped make up my mind when Kara hinted that Deirdre’s friends, her pack, included some capable mechanics and gear-heads. So the bill for fixing up my car would probably be pretty low. That didn’t mean I’d trust her, of course, but at least I’d be closer to making an escape than if I stayed at the shelter and hoped my car magically fixed itself.
I thanked Kara profusely and asked her to pass along the message to Sunny and the rest of the crew, and promised to pay it forward if I ever got a chance. She just smiled and said she was pretty sure our paths would cross again, which made the back of my neck prickle in an odd way. I dismissed it and got into Deirdre’s car, holding my loom bag and knitting on my lap, just in case.
And then it was a short, slightly awkward car ride back the way I’d run the night before to a fancy-ass house in a mostly respectable neighborhood. It all looked so