the pack who had never questioned you taking over wonder if there might be something to the question.”
Honor swore. “I knew I should have kicked his sorry ass out of my territory before he had time to shut his damned car door.”
Her uncle raised a brow. “Right. Either way, it’s too late for that now. The cat’s out of the bag. Having him here has only made the Mating Rite more likely. You aren’t the only one who finds the thought of it hard to swallow, but having the Silverback question you will make it go down easier for quite a few of them. What really throws a wrench in the works is finding out that he’s marked you for his mate. That’s a hell of a thing to have happen right now.”
“You already told me it wouldn’t be any help. Since I haven’t marked him back, and he can’t put forward a claim to stop the mating hunt, what the hell good does he do me?”
“None. What he does for you doesn’t have a damn trace of good about it. He makes things worse.”
At that, something snapped in Honor’s chest. She threw back her head and laughed, loudly. She felt like a camel hauling straw when that one last blade drifted down onto her back, and the picture of herself as a were- camel only made her laugh harder. As did the look Barney Andrews threw her way. The man couldn’t have appeared more horrified if she’d stripped off her clothes and decided to dance a tarantella on top of her daddy’s desk.
That thought set her off again.
By the time she had to stop or quit breathing altogether, she was wiping tears from her eyes and clutching her aching belly.
“Goddess’ sake, Ham, she’s lost her damned mind,” Barney hissed, as if Honor couldn’t hear him, standing as she was less than five feet away from him. “Not that it doesn’t make the question of her fitness to lead a lot easier to answer, but what the hell are we supposed to do now?”
“Whew.” Honor blew out a deep breath and grabbed ahold of herself. The elder might be looking at her funny, but she recognized the laughter for what it was—a release from the vibrating knot of tension that had been winding tighter and tighter inside of her for days. Hell, maybe even years. “Don’t fit me for a straitjacket just yet, Barney. I haven’t gone off the deep end. Not yet anyway. But you’ve got to admit, at this point saying things have just gotten worse is like saying that when a man’s wife steals his truck to leave him, not only does she run over his dog, she mails him back the bill to get the fender fixed.”
That comparison didn’t seem to reassure him.
Shrugging, she turned back to her uncle. “Okay, Uncle Ham. Lay it on me. What’s the bottom line about Hunter’s impact on the situation? I won’t even question that he makes things worse, but what did you mean by it?”
Hamish nodded, looking unfazed by her outburst. Hell, the man had known her since her first breath; he’d seen her act crazier.
“Logan Hunter doesn’t just undermine your claim to be alpha,” he said, holding her gaze with his own, his age and her affection for him making it possible. “I said before that the males who want to move against you at the Howl, they won’t recognize him as your mate, not with the mark unreturned and him being the beta of another pack, but that doesn’t mean Hunter won’t want to stake his claim.” He pushed his upper body back up straight. “Now, I spoke to the boy, so I don’t think he’s dumb enough or mean enough to try to join in the rite, even if our males would let him, but he’s not going to just stand aside and let anyone try to hurt you, either. So my guess is, when the rite is declared and the first male steps up to challenge you, Hunter is going to try to take him down.”
Closing her eyes, Honor let her head fall back and sighed. Now she could see where this was going— straight to hell, just like everything else in her life. “And when he does that, it will set off all the other males. There really will be a riot. Anyone who doesn’t like me—or who just doesn’t like having an outsider interfering in pack business—is going to try to kill Logan. When the whole thing is over, I’m left with either half a pack, with the rest lying dead at the Silverback’s feet, or a dead Silverback and the beginnings of a war with the most powerful Lupine pack in the eastern United States.”
“That about sums it up.”
Honor was silent for a moment, just letting the irony of it all sink in. Here she stood, a female who didn’t even want to be alpha, faced with a situation that redefined the idea of a no-win scenario. She felt like she was trapped in an episode of
Finally, she blew out a breath and opened her eyes.
“So, what do you suggest I do?” she asked, her mouth twisting into a wry curve. “If I shift and start running now, I could be halfway to the Canadian border before moonrise on Saturday.”
Hamish returned the expression. “You’d never get that far. If the pack didn’t track you down, that mate of yours would.”
She shook her head. “We both know he can’t be my mate, uncle. There’s no way it can work. When this is over, if either one of us is still alive, we’ll be going our separate ways. I can’t leave the pack, and he can’t take orders from anyone but his own alpha. That’s just the way it is.”
“One step at a time, sweetheart. First, figure out a way to get through the weekend, then worry about your love life.”
“Right. Survival. Check.” She paused for several long seconds. “Any idea how to make that happen?”
“Not at the moment, but you’ve got forty-five hours left to figure it out.”
“Forty-five hours? Sure. Piece of cake.”
Or not.
Eleven
Logan left Honor alone in her office and ran. He entered the woods in a blind fury, his heart pounding in his ears, rage burning through his veins like poison. He paid no attention to the snow that crunched icily under the callused pads of his feet, or to the scent of more snow coming in on the ozone-sharpened breeze. None of it mattered, and none of it could penetrate the red haze that fogged his mind and kept him operating on pure instinct, the instinct to run or to kill. Preferably both.
He ran for hours, zigzagging through the dense New England woods, letting his sense of smell inform him whenever he got close to the edges of the White Paw Clan’s territory. The first time the scent hit him, it only increased his fury. He should have smelled his mate at those borders, because the edge of a Lupine territory was always scent-marked by the alpha of the pack. Instead, all Logan could smell was an unfamiliar dominant male who must have been Honor’s father. The fact that his mate’s position was still too tenuous for her to go out and mark her own lands made him seethe inside, but gradually, as he expended the adrenaline that drove his rage, he began to take comfort in the lingering traces of her scent he picked up here and there around the forest. Honor might not have scented her borders quite yet, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t left her mark on this territory. She had become part of the land here, just as it had become part of her.
Shortly after sunset, the last of the driving anger burned up in the relentless pounding of his paws against the earth, and Logan collapsed, panting, under a towering pine tree. The dry needles piled beneath it crunched under his weight, exposed where the thick forest cover had shielded the ground from the last light snowfall. Ears back, tongue lolling, Logan took a moment to catch his breath and let the sounds and scents of the forest soothe and calm him.
He had needed that run. Badly. The tension of the last couple of days had piled on top of his already deep sense of restlessness and discontent until he’d come within inches of losing control completely and going on the kind of rampage that made humans write stories about mindless, bloodthirsty werewolves who could only be stopped by the impact of a silver bullet. Logan had always wondered where that thing about the silver had come from. As far as he knew, if you put any kind of a bullet into the dead center of something coming at you, it was pretty much done. Choice of metal really just boiled down to semantics.
Now, with night closing in on the forest, Logan reluctantly began to pad back toward the Tate house and a
