Bride (Ali Hazelwood) by Ali Hazelwood

            He shakes his head. “If you met someone without a nose and had to explain to them what a smell feels like, what would you tell them?” He looks at me expectantly. And I open my mouth half a dozen times—only to close it just as many, frustrated. “Yup.” He doesn’t even sound too told-you-so-y. “It was like that with Roscoe. He was a grown adult, I was barely past puberty, but I always knew that he was never going to win a fight against me, and he always knew it, and everyone in the pack knew it, too. As much as I despise him now, I’m thankful that he gave me long enough without a reason to challenge him.”

            Without becoming a despotic leader, he means. “What changed him?”

            “Hard to say. His views escalated very suddenly.” He licks his full lips, looking faraway, in the grip of a memory. “I got the phone call and didn’t even have the time to stop by my apartment on the way to the airport. My mother had vocally opposed a raid. She was wounded, and Ana was defenseless.”

            “Shit.”

            “It was eleven hours and forty minutes from the moment I got the phone call until I pulled up Cal’s driveway and found Ana sobbing in Misha’s room.” His tone is emotionless, almost disturbingly so. “I was terrified.”

            I can’t imagine. Or can I? Those first few days after Serena was gone, and I was so frantically preoccupied with looking for her that it didn’t occur to me to bathe or feed until my head pounded and my body was feverish.

            “Did you ever get to go back to Zurich? To pick up your stuff? To . . .” Get closure. Say goodbye to the life you’d built. Maybe you had friends, a girlfriend, a favorite takeout place. Maybe you used to sleep in in the morning, or take long weekend trips to travel around Europe and check out . . . buildings, or something. Maybe you had dreams. Did you go back to retrieve those?

            He shakes his head. “My landlord mailed a couple of things. Threw out the rest.” He scratches his jaw. “Feel kinda bad for leaving my dirty breakfast dishes in the sink.”

            I chuckle. “It’s kind of your thing, isn’t it?”

            “What?” He turns to me.

            “Blaming yourself for being anything less than perfect.”

            “If you want to wash my dishes, by all means.”

            “Shush.” I lightly bump my shoulder into his, like I do with Serena when she’s being obtuse. He stiffens, stills in a breathless sort of tension for a moment, then slowly relaxes as I pull away. “So, this dominance thing. Is Cal the second most dominant Were in the pack?” This sounds foreign, like picking words at random. Magnetic fridge poetry.

            “We’re not a military organization. There’s no strict hierarchy within the pack. Cal just happens to be someone I trust.”

            Can’t be more dysfunctional than arbitrary councils whose membership is established through primogeniture. And Humans elect leaders like Governor Davenport. Clearly, there’s no perfect solution here. “Did he also have to challenge someone to become a second? Maybe Ken Doll?”

            “It’s fucked up that I know who you’re referring to.”

            I chuckle. “Hey, he has never introduced himself.”

            “Ludwig. His name is Ludwig. And our pack has over a dozen seconds, who are chosen within their huddle through a caucus system.”

            “Huddle?”

            “It’s a web of interconnected families. Usually geographically close. Each second reports to the Alpha. After Roscoe, new seconds were elected, which means that most of them are as new to this as I am. Mick is the only one who kept his position.”

            “You mean, the only one who didn’t try to kill you?”

            “Yup.” His laugh could be bitter, but it isn’t. “He and his mate were close friends of my mother’s. Shannon used to be a second, too.”

            “Did you kill her?” I ask, conversationally, and he’s so gonna push me off the roof.

            “Misery.”

            “It’s a fair question, given your precedents.”

            “No, I did not kill the mate of the man who used to change my diapers.” He massages his temple. “Hell, they both did. They taught me how to ride bikes and track prey.”