The council would kill him.

Veyr sat at the head of the table and listened to the squabbling going on around him. They weren’t listening to him, instead debating pack politics and precedence in ever-increasing voices. He sighed and rubbed at his temple.

Images of Cyan spread out naked over the tiles in front of him kept replaying in his mind. Her soft skin and softer sighs, the warm, silken feeling of her body around his fingers. The shudders that racked her body as she’d come hard and fast over his hand.

He bit back his groan and readjusted his position in his chair to conceal the raging hard-on trying to punch through his pants, and ordered his body to calm down. In a room full of werewolves, all with an excellent sense of smell, his condition wouldn’t remain a secret for long. Not if his damn brain kept up presenting him with images of Cyan in various seductive poses. He couldn’t wait to get back to her and finish what they’d started earlier.

“I’m telling you, this will not fly.” Jacob McCauley almost shouted, his face flushed as he faced down Alex, alpha of the Kingwood pack. Brave move. The Kingwood’s were distant cousins of the Langdon bloodline, and some said that every so often the old stone-wolf genetics re-emerged.

Veyr’s gaze slid sideways to an empty seat at the council table, the back carved with the Langdon coat of arms. It had been empty for years, left that way as a mark of respect for the cursed alphas that couldn’t be with them. He’d never seen the Langdon’s, cursed to stone by a witch centuries before in an ironic parody of their true natures, but he had fought those with stone wolf blood in the ring. He’d won, naturally, but only just.

Legend had it that stone wolves were the product of Werewolves and Gargoyles. Which meant, like both their parent races, they were hard as nails and twice as difficult to kill. Times fucking two.

Veyr’s face split into a grin and he sat back to watch the show. Alex Kingwood was one of the younger alphas on the council, but rock-solid, confident in his own skin, unlike the always pushing Jacob. But now, his eyes flashed with anger and he didn’t back down from Jacob an inch. Perhaps Veyr wouldn’t have to deal with McCauley after all. Fights between alphas weren’t unknown. Pack leaders could be replaced by rite of challenge. It would be a little odd for Alex to hold two seats on the council…

Veyr bit back his amusement. One for each asscheek?

“I don’t care what you know, or what you think you know,” Alex snarled, his voice deepening with his wolf halfway until it became a full-out rumble. “This is pseudo law. Spurious. Just the way things have always been, not what is written into law.”

“Law or not, would you want your bloodline corrupted by a filthy human?” Jacob all but screamed, spittle flying from the corners of his lips. His words dropped into silence, and Veyr’s amusement vanished. They’d been discussing borders between pack territories. He should have known Jacob would bring it right back to this.

It was obvious the fact Veyr hadn’t picked his sister at Midwinter ate at Jacob, niggling away under his skin. At every opportunity, he steered the council’s discussion toward how unlawful it would be for the Master of the City to take anything but a pure-blooded lycan woman to his bed.

“Corrupted?”

“Filthy human?”

Alex Kingswood and Nick Trevais spoke at once, their voices so cold they were almost arctic. Both had reason to be. Alex because he always took comments about pureblood lines to heart, and Nick because the woman Jacob had taken such a dislike to and had just described as a filthy human was his sister.

“I suggest, Jacob,” Veyr said, his words dropping into the silence in the room with precision. “That you retire from the current discussion to consider your words, and the thinking behind them.”

Jacob had apparently not learned his lesson because he whipped around to face Veyr, fury on his face. “I will do no such thing. I have a right to be here. You cannot dismiss me like an errant schoolboy!”

Veyr pinned him with a hard gaze. “Then I suggest you stop acting like one. Before you face down a challenge.” He glanced toward Nick and Alex, both still bristling with rage. Why was he trying to smooth this over, rather than just throwing the little shit literally to the wolves?

He sighed inwardly. Because he was the Master of the City. The one who everyone looked up to, was scared of, but who had to do the most compromising to keep everything running smoothly so everyone else wouldn’t have to.

All. The. Time.

Fuck. It would be easier to run a damn kindergarten. For ferrets. Or plait jam. He liked jam. Juggle soot in a white suit… Any number of frigging things.

Somehow, Jacobs’s obviously underdeveloped survival instincts kicked in and he blinked at the two bristling wolves. He bent his head, backing off.

“Perhaps it is time for the council to call a recess.”

Veyr’s teeth ground as Jacob spoke, somehow making it seem as though he was the one to decide what the council did or did not do. Perhaps his ambition didn’t just extend to ensuring his sister mated the Master of the City, perhaps he cast greedy eyes to the main seat himself…

“Indeed, it is.” Veyr stood, not bothering to hide the lethal grace in his movements. He hadn’t been brought up with a silver spoon in his mouth like most of the council. He was a fighter, a scrapper from the streets. “And Jacob?”

Jacob, already on his way to the door, turned to look over his shoulder. Veyr extended a single claw, running it over the table in front of him as he walked around it. An impressive feat, since only full and powerful alphas could part shift with such precision.

“Don’t try my patience any more. It will not go well for you.”

---

“Do you plan to take Cyan to mate? Or are you just going to use her as some kind of fuck-buddy?”

Veyr had managed less than five steps from the door to the council chamber before he was accosted. Holding in the sigh that wanted to escape his chest with effort, he turned to face Nick Trevais, Cyan’s brother.

One of the calmest members of the council, Nick was usually the voice of reason, the one who could be counted upon to inject a measure of reason into even the most heated of battle plans. Just last month when the city’s territory had been breached by scouting parties from a city to the west, Nick had advised caution. His suggestion had been to return the errant wolves with a diplomatic envoy rather than sending them back in pieces, as was custom.

His instinct had paid off. Turned out that the wolves were young, and had been out without permission. The Mistress of their City had torn them off a strip right in front of the envoy, whom she had asked to convey her deepest gratitude to Veyr. Turned out that one of them had been her nephew, so killing them would have caused an all-out war, something that Veyr wished to avoid.

Now though, Nick was anything but calm. Anger shone in his eyes, the amber color warning Veyr that Nick’s wolf was close to the surface. So close in fact, that fur poked through the skin under his collar as he glared at Veyr. Although his sister couldn’t shift—unusual for an alpha’s sister—that Nick could shift was very obvious.

Veyr knew he had to tread lightly or this could end up in a challenge fight. Which he would win. There was no way on Earth Nick could match him for fighting ability. But trying to explain to the woman he loved that he’d killed her brother? That would not end well…

He paused. Blinked.

He loved Cyan.

Time dilated as a warm, fuzzy feeling spread out from the center of his chest. He’d never thought about love. Lust and the need to possess, emotions driven by his wolf, took precedence, but under all that was a deep, a soul-deep, connection. A need to have her in his life. Always. To wake up with her next to him every morning.

“Well?” Nick’s voice had dropped to a snarl and Veyr snapped his head up, met the other wolf’s gaze.

“I don’t plan to take her to mate, no.” He put his hand up as Nick surged forward, fury radiating from every line of his body. “There’s no planning involved. I will mate her. No matter what the council and that fucktard Jacob says about it.”

Nick relaxed, the amber vanishing from his eyes and the fur disappearing from his collar. “Thank fuck for that.” He chuckled, as though a little embarrassed. “Because, dude, I really was not looking forward to you handing my ass on a plate. But she’s my sister, you know… it’s all about family honor.”

Veyr chuckled and looped his arm over Nick’s shoulders as they walked away from the council chambers. “My friend, I would do nothing that puts a pack’s honor at risk. Don’t worry.”

As they walked away, neither of them noticed the figure lurking in the shadows at the end of the hall or the brief, satisfied flare of amber in its eyes.