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few more whispered instructions and then left, closing the door firmly behind him.
    “I am disappointed in you Vadim.” Eloise’s voice was soft and held a musical lilt that had been a calming force on Vadim as he grew up. Although almost a thousand years old, his mother looked no more than thirty – her skin was still pale and unlined, her long blond hair swept up on her head in an elaborate style that she had redone every single morning of her life. Her slim figure was clad in the finest pale blue silks – her only concession to her prison visit being a sturdy pair of shoes, tinted in the same hue as her dress but totally unlike the fine sandals that usually graced her dainty feet.
    “I didn’t mean for my actions to upset you, Mother,” Vadim said formally. He hated disappointing his mother. In his long years of life, she had never let him down. “The Coven should stay out of wolf affairs and leave the Cloverleah pack alone. Ermine is going to lose a lot of good men in his desire to give in to his wife’s latest whim. I was simply trying to stop him,” Vadim said. He fidgeted a bit in his chains, wanting to show his mother respect by standing up as straight as he could. Not an easy thing to do with his ankles shackled to the wall.
    “You’ve been to Cloverleah yourself now. They are well protected? Is that a problem for us?”
    “They are a pack, mother. A well-armed, extremely loyal to each other, pack . If we leave them alone they won’t be any problem to us at all, but that is the only way I could guarantee anyone’s safety,” Vadim said, emphasizing the word pack firmly. He didn’t know a lot about wolf shifters, but he knew from the way the men at Cloverleah behaved during his short stint on their grounds, that no one would be able to get their hands on the pack’s smallest member. Not by force or any other means.
    Eloise shrugged an elegant shoulder. “Surely they have nothing there that could defeat a full-scale coven attack. We are not a small coven.”
    “Mother,” Vadim said, cursing the chains that bound him. He would get on his knees and beg if he could. He had to get his mother to understand how a successful coven attack was not on the cards. “The Cloverleah pack is unlike any other we’ve ever seen. A small pack, yes – all men, no women or children that could be used as hostages or leverage. But unlike most other packs, most of the men in Cloverleah are true mated which means their bonds are stronger than any other. They have a huge percentage Alpha wolves – unseen in any other pack and rather than cause discord, these men are close in their ties with each other. Their pack Alpha is mated to a Shifter Guardian. Their members include a massive cat shifter, three Fae, one of whom is rumored to be the ruler of the Western States in the Fae realm, and a mated Omega – don’t you understand what all that means?”
    Eloise looked thoughtful. Vadim always knew his mother hid a wealth of intelligence behind her beautiful façade. Then she appeared to change tact.
    “How do you know all this from one little meeting, one that apparently did not go well.”
    “I did my research before I entered their territory, like Ermine should have done,” Vadim snapped back. “And the meeting would have gone fine if Stephen had responded to the questions asked of him verbally, and not just lunged with a knife at the nearest pack member. Up until that moment we had been greeted with courtesy.”
    Vadim didn’t see the point in mentioning that the pack member that Stephen had tried to attack was the same Fae that cursed him. He had enough experiences with Fae curses to know that was a really stupid thing for Stephen to do. Firstly a knife wouldn’t have killed the Fae unless it was an exacting blow and secondly the curse would have remained whether the dark-haired Fae was alive or dead. If Stephen had succeeded and actually killed the Fae, he and his children, his children’s children and everyone