LITMIR.BIZ

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father stopped and faced us, and Di Carlo and his enforcers fanned out around us all. “You think we should strike here? On the mountain?”

      I shrugged, trying to look more confident than I felt. “It’s neutral territory, so Malone doesn’t have home field advantage. And if you call in our men while we’re gone, they could be here by the time we get back with the birds, which means we’ll have Malone vastly outnumbered. It could all be over relatively quickly and easily.” Assuming he didn’t catch wind of what we were doing and bring more of his own men.

      My father considered for a moment, then looked to Di Carlo for an opinion. “We’ve never fought on a large scale in neutral territory.” So far, war had always come in the form of a territorial invasion. “If this maneuver didn’t occur to us, it probably won’t occur to him.”

      I nodded, eagerness creeping up from my toes to tingle in the rest of my body. “And if we don’t make a move soon, we’re going to lose the opportunity. Malone’ll do everything possible to handicap us, starting with exiling Marc.” One of our very best fighters. “Again.” Or worse.

      Di Carlo frowned. “I agree, but are we really ready to go to war this soon?”

      “We’ve been ready,” Jace said. “We just need to call in a little favor and get the rest of our men in place.” Only a few enforcers apiece had accompanied the Alphas to the cabin complex.

      “I don’t see that we have any choice,” my father said. “Calvin’s already talking about supplementing the council chair’s budget, for operating costs. I have no doubt he’ll spend that money hiring more enforcers. Add his allies’ troops to that, and our chances of a victory decrease with every day that we give them to prepare.”

      Di Carlo finally nodded. “But we need to make sure Aaron and Rick are on board before you three head for New Mexico. Unfortunately, we won’t have time to discuss it all tonight. We reconvene in fifteen minutes.”

      “How about over lunch tomorrow, in our cabin?” my father asked.

      Di Carlo thought for a moment, then nodded again. “I’ll pass it along, and hopefully you three can leave that afternoon.”

      My father glanced from me to Marc, then to Jace. “I’ll fly Vic and Brian out to replace you.”

      I couldn’t resist a smile. It was finally happening. Malone was going to pay, and a mere pound of flesh would not suffice. Justice demanded all one hundred eighty pounds of him, laid out cold and dead for the earth to reclaim.

      Chapter Eight

      “I’d call him crazy, if he weren’t so well organized.” My uncle Rick Wade leaned back in the ratty armchair, his furrowed forehead reflecting the disappointment on every other face in the room. Including my own, no doubt. “Malone knew he was going to win, and he came prepared. Some of his proposals are obviously dictatorial, but they’ve been phrased very carefully, so they’re hard to reasonably object to.”

      “Yeah, he’s good at maintaining the illusion of integrity. It’s like an evil superpower.” I flipped up the chipped, stainless-steel lever on the kitchen faucet, and water poured into the huge pot. It would take forever to boil on the outdated electric stove, but spaghetti was the easiest meal we knew how to cook in large quantities, and we had extra mouths to feed—my uncle and Aaron Taylor, plus Vic and Brian, who had flown in that morning to replace me, Jace, and Marc, under the assumption we’d be leaving soon for New Mexico.

      At the stove, Marc stirred two skillets of ground beef. He was stiff and still irritated because I’d spent the night on the couch, rather than sleep between him and Jace, or try to convince one of them to take the couch.

      Jace looked up from the slices of French bread he was buttering and gave me a small smile. At the moment, anything that pissed Marc off made him happy—Jace was still mad about me wearing eau de Marc the night before.

      “And you don’t think recruiting testimony from the thunderbirds would do any good?” my uncle asked, looking less than convinced.

      “I think we’ve moved beyond political solutions, Rick,” my father said from the chair opposite his brother-in-law. “We always knew it would come to this.”

      “And it’s about damn time,” Umberto Di Carlo rumbled from somewhere beyond my line of sight. “I was tired of playing nice, anyway. Everyone knows Cal ordered the maneuver that got Ethan killed and we know he’s responsible for the thunderbird attack that killed Charley Eames and Jake Taylor—”

      Aaron Taylor blinked at the mention of his dead son, and I looked away from his pain, because it resurrected my own.

      “—and almost cost us Kaci,” Di Carlo continued. And that was without even mentioning the strays he’d had tagged and/or murdered in the free zone, which had almost gotten Marc killed. “It’s time he pays for all of that. I say let’s quit dragging our feet and make it a real consequence. One he can’t live with.”

      “I couldn’t agree more.” My father’s comment was so soft I almost missed it, and when I glanced up, I saw him staring at the coffee table, his hands templed beneath his chin. He was eager for justice, but no Alpha in his right mind would ask for war without considering the consequences. The possible losses.

      “I want to see him pay for Jake’s death. But before we jump into anything, I need to know that we’re all on the same page,” Aaron Taylor said, as I turned off the water and hauled the half-filled pot out of the sink. “We’re talking about war. About attacking another Alpha and his allies…”

      “We’re talking about killing Calvin Malone.” I left the pot on the counter and crossed the kitchen to the doorway, where I could see the whole room. The Alphas had grouped around the coffee table, and Di Carlo’s enforcers lined the far wall. “We’re talking about removing him from power by removing him from life. That’s what he deserves, and that’s the only permanent solution to the growing problem he represents.”

      Taylor leaned forward in his chair, eyeing first me, then his fellow Alphas. “Yes, but full-scale war? If Jake’s death has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t afford to lose that many toms.”

      “Neither can we afford to leave Malone in charge,” my father pointed out in his quiet, reasonable tone. “The loss of both lives and liberty would be devastating.”

      “Yes, but why not target only Malone?” my uncle asked from the couch.

      I picked up an open box of spaghetti from the counter. “We could do it that way, and personally I’d love to be there when Malone takes his last breath. But that’s only postponing the inevitable. What do you think the Appalachian Pride and its allies will do if we assassinate their leader? What would we do, if they killed one of you?”

      Uncle Rick sighed. “Full-scale war. But we can’t turn back from that, once it starts.”

      “Of course not.” My father dropped his hands and sat straighter, drawing all attention his way while I set the pot on the stove and turned the burner on high. “That’s the point. The direction the council is headed is unacceptable, and it’s going to take something drastic to set it straight again.”

      “I agree.” Uncle Rick’s shoulders slumped beneath the burden of responsibility they must all have been feeling. “All I’m saying is that, after this, it’ll never be the same. The council may never be truly united again.”

      “It hasn’t been for quite some time,” Di Carlo pointed out. “And our failure to act won’t change that. If we start a war to get rid of Malone, we may destroy the council in the process. But if we let things continue, he’ll restructure the council to suit his own needs, effectively destroying it himself.”

      “He’s already started that,” Taylor interjected, and his heavy gaze landed on me with particular weight.

      “Whoa, what does that mean?” I glanced at the pot of water, then decided that

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