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movement over his shoulder caught my eye. “Faythe?” Marc called, jogging toward us with Jace on his heels.
    â€œI’m fine,” I insisted, as they barreled to a stop on either side of me. “Dean and I were just comparing war wounds. He won. Someone cut him up pretty badly, huh, Colin?”
    Dean growled again. “Stay out of my way, bitch. Or I’ll make that scratch on your face look like a mercy.” He and Alex stomped back toward their cabin.
    â€œWhat the hell was that?” Marc demanded once they were gone.
    I shrugged. “Dean’s playing games, so I tried to draw a foul.”
    Jace frowned. “You wanted him to hit you?”
    I tossed my head toward the main lodge, where several forms were now visible in the windows. “With anaudience to see him throw the first punch? Hell, yeah. We need every advantage we can get over Malone.”
    â€œWell, let’s aim for advantages that don’t involve any more stitches or bruises for you, okay?” Jace smiled, and Marc scowled, and as had become my habit, I stood between them. Alone, among company. Untouched, and frankly missing the easy physical contact most werecats thrive on.
    â€œLet’s just get the key.” Marc shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and headed for the lodge. “Your dad’s waiting,”
    Jace and I followed without a word, but that brief, awkward silence couldn’t compare to the one that greeted us when Marc pushed open the front door of the lodge. The main room was crowded with toms, and I didn’t find a friendly face among them. Milo Mitchell and Wes Gardner—Alphas of the northwest and Great Lakes Prides, respectively—sat opposite each other in worn armchairs, a battered coffee table separating them. Three of their enforcers sat on the matching couch, all glaring at us with identical expressions of disgust.
    We’d lost Gardner’s favor when we failed to execute Manx for killing his brother Jamey. Traumatized from having been kidnapped, raped, and held prisoner, Manx was on the run and pregnant at the time, and the fact that no other Alpha in the world would have killed a pregnant tabby did little to mollify Wes. He’d felt excluded from the process and had resented my father ever since.
    Milo Mitchell’s son Kevin was exiled from the south-central Pride around the same time, for sneaking strays into the territory for money. Mitchell’s hatred of all things Sanders was cemented when Marc killed Kevinduring a fight in the free zone less than a month before the scheduled vote.
    I hovered in the doorway, overwhelmed by the waves of hostility crashing over me. Nearly everyone in that room hated me, and some of them hated Marc even more. Jace’s real enemies were in his birth Pride, but his stepfather’s allies were more than willing to dislike Jace based purely on his association with me and mine.
    â€œYou have a lot of nerve showing up here,” a new voice growled from my left, and I turned to see Jerald Pierce—Parker’s father and Alpha of the Great Plains territory—stalking toward me from the kitchen.
    â€œThanks, I guess.” I shrugged and tried to let the animosity roll off my back, but it’s hard to stand tall in the face of pure loathing. Especially when so much of it is coming from a close friend’s father. No wonder Parker had opted to stay at the ranch, in the company of a growing collection of bottles. “Though I tend to think of it as a sense of duty and obligation to my Alpha.” My father. The strongest, most even-tempered and noble man I’d ever known.
    â€œWhat about honor?” Pierce demanded. “Aren’t you the one always talking about doing the right thing? Where the hell was that sense of honor when you were handing my son over to be slaughtered by a flock of dirty thunderbirds?”
    Well, at least it’s out in the open now…. Though that did nothing to