within a family unless dire circumstances come about, so rightfully I should have been the next in line to lead the pack. Unfortunately, I was four and not strong enough to hold the pack together. My mother remarried and he was... not a nice man.”
I held my breath, no longer certain I wanted to hear the rest of the story. His expression lost its typical easygoing, jovial relaxation, and instead hardened into the mask of a man who’d survived his share of trauma. I’d imagined him living a charmed life, to have come out a good guy with an easy smile and the willingness to help others. Perhaps he was such a good guy because he’d seen how truly bad some men could be and deliberately chose the opposite.
The pause before he spoke again held a wealth of information that he didn’t want to share, and I knew enough about the bad things that some people did to others that I could fill in the gaps. Henry frowned into the beer bottle that the waitress delivered, along with a basket of onion rings, before going on. “I challenged him when I thought I was strong enough, but he defeated me. I ran a few years later. I should have stayed, maybe, and tried to save the pack from him, but I was selfish. I wanted to be on my own.”
“That’s not selfish,” I said quietly. “It’s not selfish to need to protect yourself.”
Henry shrugged, his gaze sliding away. “Doesn’t always feel that way, does it?”
I nodded, since I knew what he meant. I picked up my own beer and hoped that it would take the edge off the raw emotions that bounced around inside my chest. I was still too hyped up by the confrontation with the fae banker and the swirling headiness of Henry’s kiss. “So she wants you to go back now, is that it? Take over for your stepdad?”
“That’s what she wants.” Henry frowned as he stared off to the side, attention no doubt drifting back to Montana or wherever his old pack waited. “I left that pack and have no interest in revisiting the memories there. It’s better for everyone if I stay gone. The alpha can come from any family in the pack—they’ll fight it out until the strongest wins, then that will start a new family dynasty for alpha.”
“But what if the one who’s strongest is as bad as your stepfather? Or worse?”
Henry’s frown deepened. He didn’t respond as the waitress appeared with baskets of spare ribs, smoked brisket, pulled pork, sausage, and heaps of mashed potatoes, corn bread, and every other sort of carbohydrate under the sun. The sheer amount of food stunned me into silence, compounded by the fact that apparently there weren’t plates at the restaurant—people ate family-style right out of the baskets. Henry heaped the tender ribs in front of me and piled up a mountain of juicy bits of brisket, attentive even as he inhaled several pounds of meat in the blink of an eye.
I hardly made a dent in my share of the food by the time he’d cleaned up approximately half a cow and most of the cornbread, and he wiped barbecue sauce off his hands—almost to his elbows—before he swigged from his beer and watched me with a faint smile. “I hadn’t thought about whether the man who took over as alpha would be worse than Ulrich. I didn’t think it was my problem.”
“Maybe it isn’t,” I said, trying to wipe sauce from the corner of my mouth and only succeeded in smearing it across my cheek more. From the look on his face, I didn’t have quite the gravitas that I might have liked. “But maybe that’s what makes your sister so afraid. Instead of telling her you won’t go back no matter what, maybe it’s worth having that conversation about what really scares her about you not being the one in charge.”
He grumbled and shifted his weight on the stool, then put more pulled pork in front of me. “You’re too smart, witch.”
I laughed, shaking a rib at him and flinging a little sauce at his arm. “You mean I’m right.”
“You might be right,” he said, though he smiled as he said it. Something twinkled in his eyes as he watched me. “We’ll find out tonight, though, won’t we? How do you like the food?”
“At this rate, I won’t be able to eat for days,” I said. I tried to lick my fingers clean,