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  "Sorry, a bit more wheeling and dealing still had to take place. Things are more or less settled now, but they aren't great still."

  He pulled my door shut and then walked around the room, head tracking back and forth, until he found a small electronic device on the desk and turned it on.

  "White noise generator. Most packs have them in pretty much every room these days. It's the only way to have even half a chance at privacy. As long as we talk fairly quietly we should be OK."

  I nodded, somehow more relieved than I'd expected to be at the thought of even a little privacy, a short time to be truly alone with Ash.

  "All of the fighters in the pack are headed out into the desert. Alec wants to make sure that the non-combatants are safely out of the way when Anton makes his appearance."

  "He can't really guarantee that though, right? Anton's not stupid, he'll think of circling back here and killing Rachel and the others first thing when he realizes that Alec's taken us in."

  Ash gave me a tired smile. "A valid concern usually, but this place is built over a series of natural caves. When the Graves family moved into the area they walled a section of it off. There's one piece that's the next best thing to an indestructible bank vault. Rachel and the rest will hole up there. If Anton shows up they'll call Alec and the rest for help."

  I let my mind twist the idea around a couple of times and then shrugged. "So multiple lines in, all buried so that he can't cut them off all at once?"

  "Yes, and a remarkable number of cameras hidden throughout the grounds and house. As long as the rest of the pack survives the confrontation, the civilians will be safe."

  I could suddenly see where Ash was going and I didn't like it.

  "I really don't want to be stuck in a hole in the ground while you're facing Anton again, Ash."

  Ash cleared his throat. "Actually, that is exactly where I'd like for you to be. Unfortunately Alec won't bend on the point. He's determined that you'll be accompanying us out to the ambush site."

  I found myself sighing in relief. It went against every natural instinct for self-preservation, but the idea of being away from him, of not knowing whether or not he survived, was more terrifying than the prospect of not surviving myself.

  "It's OK, I think it's better that way."

  Ash shook his head. "No. It's not better, but I don't think we have any other options at this point."

  I started to say something, but he cut me off.

  "I want you to promise me that you'll run for it if things go badly out there."

  "Ash, don't be crazy. You came here specifically because Alec can bring Anton down. I heard you earlier. He's got some kind of remote kill switch ability. Anton will show up and Alec will put him down."

  "I'm not so sure of that. There are rumors that it was some kind of fluke, that he can't control it, or that it wasn't even a power. It isn't the kind of thing that makes sense, I've never heard of a power manifesting and then de-manifesting, but the rumors are too persistent not to have some kind of basis in truth. I was thinking it was all just a garbled version of something, but they aren't acting like they expect Alec to just drop this guy instantly."

  "So if he doesn't have the power, what does that mean?"

  Ash looked like he didn't want to answer, but I was pretty sure he hadn't ever outright lied to me before and I was banking on him not being willing to violate his record.

  "By all accounts Alec, James and Isaac are all pretty good fighters. Jasmin is actually pretty good as well, much better than you generally expect out of a non-hybrid. Dominic will eventually be fairly powerful, assuming she lives that long, but she's pretty worthless in a fight right now, and Jessica's just as bad."

  Ash was pacing now, refusing to meet my eyes.

  "We already know how I stack up against Anton. A lot of things can go unexpectedly in a melee of that size, but the odds are just too steep. If Alec doesn't flip his 'kill switch,' Anton will kill all of us, but there might be a window of opportunity where you can escape. If that happens, I want you to get out of there. Go to Anya, tell her I sent you and that 'case black' is in effect. She'll get you out of the country and try to come up with a plan to keep you in motion until someone finally takes Anton down."

  I shook my head, unable to find the words, but Ash grabbed me by my shoulder and then put his finger to my lips.

  "Kristin, I won't go out there knowing that you're planning on going down with the rest of us. Alec can rip my throat out, but I won't do it. I need to know that you have a chance of surviving. Promise me."

  Every system in my body felt like it was on the fritz. This was the closest he'd ever come to expressing the same kind of feelings for me that I had for him. I found myself nodding without even being sure what it meant and Ash sighed in relief.

  "I'm so sorry that it came to this. I wish I'd been able to stop him myself so that we didn't have to get sucked into Alec's little empire."

  I shook my head. "Please don't say stuff like that. You've saved me again and again. I never would have picked this life for myself, but looking back at how it's gone so far I have to say that I wouldn't do anything different. If we have to deal with all of this craziness I'm glad that we can do it together."

  His hand moved down to my waist, pulling me gently but firmly towards him. I was still trying to register what was going on, still hoping this wasn't some kind of weird, waking dream when his other hand found the back of my head and pulled my lips to his.

  It was everything I'd imagined a kiss to be and somehow still nothing like I'd expected. He was soft and firm all at once and I felt a tingle of excitement course through me as I realized he'd finally made his feelings toward me unmistakably clear. In that moment there wasn't anywhere else I would have rather been.

  By the time Ash pulled back it was all I could do not to gasp for air. The kiss hadn't been that long, but it had been so intense that all of my systems had gone into overdrive.

  "I hope that was OK. I've wanted to do something like that for a while, but it didn't seem right."

  "Right? Ash, it was absolutely wonderful. I wish you'd done it days ago. Why would you think that would be anything but oh so right?"

  "I don't know, I guess I figured that you weren't really at a point where you could be objective about your feelings for me. After all, I did save your life. It just seemed unfair to you to act on my feelings."

  I suddenly found myself biting back laughter.

  "Ash, you saved my life and then you terrorized me for hours while we ran from Anton. Then to top it all off you nearly died on me. I think I've got my hero worship under control. I like you. Not because you saved me, but because you are the kind of person who would risk his life going to crap in order to save someone he didn't even know."

  Ash's smile was more tentative than I normally saw out of him, but it gave me a little bit of hope that he was going to accept that I was a big girl who absolutely knew what she wanted in this instance.

  He pulled me close again and sighed.

  "I've got your promise. I don't want you hanging around doing something stupidly heroic if this all goes badly. Just get out of there and get to Anya. She'll think of something."

  I nodded, heart up in my throat, and leaned in for another kiss, but a knock at the door interrupted us before I could complete the motion. Ash released me with a frown and then walked over to the door. Alec was waiting in the hall.

  "Sorry to break things up, but we need to get moving. No telling when this Anton will show up. Ash, please go help Donovan. He's supervising the loading of the vehicles. We need enough provisions to stay out there for several weeks if it comes to it."

  Ash looked for a moment like he was going to argue, but Alec did the same power flare thing that he'd done earlier.

  "Do you really want to fight me on this? I thought you were smarter than that."

  Ash squeezed my hand once and then walked out of the room without looking back. I got the feeling that he was storing these slights up; th
at at some point there would be an accounting.

  Alec waited until Ash was gone and then pushed the door closed.

  "He finally told you how he felt?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "He's crazy about you. The rest of us could see it right off, and that you felt exactly the same way. It's one of the hazards of pack life. Given enough time you'll learn to hide the worst of the signs, but for now you're more or less an open book."

  I shrugged. He wasn't necessarily winning any points with me by pushing Ash so hard.

  "Look, what do you want, Alec? I know you're head cheese around here, so I shouldn't piss you off, but I'm not really in the mood for small talk."

  "You don't really like me, do you?"

  "Not particularly."

  "Any reason?"

  "You know the reason. You're pushing Ash just because you can, not because there's any real reason to."

  Alec's knuckles went white momentarily and I felt a spike of power come off of him.

  "I like you, Kristin, you're spunky and you show promise. Don't think though that you have any idea what's going on here. Ash needs brought to heel and soon. If he goes around with that chip on his shoulder he'll push James or Isaac too far and then we'll have real problems. I need to break him and quickly, but not so far that he becomes useless."

  It was stupid to do anything to provoke Alec, but I couldn't help it. I was pissed off enough now that I frankly didn't care what the ramifications would be of crossing whatever line I was about to cross.

  "Look, I don't like you. I don't like the way you're treating Ash, and frankly I think it speaks volumes that you seem to think of people as assets to be reshaped into something you can use. I genuinely hope we manage to kill Anton out there, but it wouldn't make me feel the least bit bad if he managed to take you down in the process."

  Alec nodded. "Well, I'm glad we're crystal clear on where you stand. You never know, you just might get your wish."

  Chapter 17

  The ambush camp with Alec's pack, or the Sanctuary pack as I was starting to think of them, was exactly the same and surprisingly different than the ambush camp with the mercenaries. In both instances it was a few degrees less comfortable than what the participants were used to, generally speaking.

  For the mercenaries that had translated to sleeping bags and a very rough cabin out in the Arizona desert. For the Sanctuary bunch that apparently meant three mammoth motor homes driven to an out-of-the-way RV park thirty miles from Sanctuary, which Alec owned. The manager of the facility had calmly nodded when Alec told him operations were indefinitely suspended, hung up a sign saying the park was closed, and then driven away without seeming to be concerned at all at the odd nature of Alec's orders.

  I guess it was occasionally useful to be known as a rich eccentric who was used to getting your own way on every point. Nobody worth knowing would actually want to spend any time with you, but it did mean that nobody batted an eye when you asked for things normal people wouldn't ask for.

  Alec and Rachel's butler, Donovan, had actually started growing on me while I helped pack up the RV's for the trip. Everything was, for the most part, packed up already by the time I got there, but I was able to load a few clothes and other things meant mostly for Ash and me. The old, limping shape shifter had actually apologized that they only had three of the enormous vehicles.

  Apparently the pack used the RV's as a kind of emergency bug-out policy. If things went downhill really quickly, the entire pack would just jump into the RV's and leave the estate. Personally, I was having a hard time imagining a scenario where you'd actually want to leave the estate along with its impregnable bunker, but apparently Alec liked being prepared.

  Given that the noncombatants weren't coming along, there was actually plenty of room for Ash and me in Alec's RV, but I did appreciate Donovan's concern. I wasn't particularly excited to spend any more time in Alec's company than I had to. It would have been nice if Ash and I had had an RV all to ourselves, like the rest of the couples. Although couples maybe wasn't quite the right term.

  James and Dominic were definitely together. Isaac and Jess though didn't seem to be. I was pretty sure Isaac was interested in Jess, but she seemed determined to keep him at arm's length. Likewise, Alec and Jasmin almost seemed to act with one mind sometimes, but there didn't seem to be anything romantic there. I was surprised that Jess and Jasmin didn't bunk up together, but maybe it was a dominance thing.

  Isaac and Alec seemed to get along pretty well, but keeping two powerful dominants in close quarters unnecessarily was just stupid. Ash was finally managing to get me up to speed on shape shifter body language and with his help I was starting to understand some of the pack dynamic. More and more I was coming to understand just how unhealthy the Sanctuary pack was.

  Once we'd arrived onsite at the ambush location, things had quickly shifted over to the same kind of nervous waiting that had defined the time Ash and I had spent with the mercenaries. The nature of the waiting however had been quite different.

  Hammer and the rest had been almost lethargic when not on duty. They'd played cards, slept, and occasionally cleaned their weapons.

  Alec kept each member of his pack active at least eight hours a day, in addition to their six-hour shift keeping an eye out for Anton. Towards the close of the second day I said something snarky about how hard Alec was driving everyone considering the tensions already present in the pack and Ash quietly disagreed with me.

  "Alec may be a real jerk when he feels like circumstances require it of him, but it's also one of his real strengths. He knows that the one thing his pack doesn't need right now is lots of extra time on their hands. He's keeping them busy and improving their level of training at the same time. It's almost unheard of for a pack this size to be actively helping each other become better fighters. A pack of two or three would be a different matter, but generally the larger the pack, the more factions you've got inside it vying for control."

  I didn't just like Ash, I respected his judgment, so I sat back in my portable camp chair and thought. Outside of when he was training me on some kind of survival skill, there was never any pressure from Ash to make a snap decision, so I let my gaze rove over the camp. The RV's were situated at the bottom of a cul-de-sac canyon with walls that were at least a couple of hundred feet high.

  I'd been nervous at first, remembering Anton surviving a series of falls from even further up, but Ash had sampled the prevailing breeze and nodded. "He can come down the walls, but he won't be able to sneak up on us from behind."

  The RV's had been parked against one side of the canyon so that they formed a kind of elongated U. With their sun shades extended and a few minutes' work with some off-white tarps anchored to the nearby rock, the pack had created a fairly sizable area which wasn't visibly accessible from above, and which you couldn't see from the ground until after you'd driven past the RV's nearly to the very end of the canyon, and looked back.

  I still wasn't sure how smart it was for us not to have a secondary exit, but Ash and Alec seemed comfortable, so I hadn't pushed the issue. At the very least, it was probably going to help lure Anton in. He'd love the idea of the entire pack being trapped down here so that he could come after all of us in one go.

  The survey of the camp had bought me enough time to think through some of the implications of the pieces Ash had been so carefully laying out for me over the last couple of days.

  "Everything about this is well-thought-out. It wouldn't surprise me if Alec hadn't purchased or built this RV park in the last few years just for the express purpose of having somewhere to stage an ambush like this while leaving Donovan, Rachel and the rest safely in the vault at the estate."

  Ash nodded. "Yes, I expect you're right there."

  "And for all of his other faults, I'm getting the vibe from you that Alec is actually a very good pack leader, the type who sacrifices and puts his own butt on the line for the good of the pack rather than playing tin god and generally ruining e
veryone's lives just because he can."

  The nod I got this time was slightly less sure, slightly more qualified.

  "I think that is Alec's nature, yes. He values his people and I think it goes against everything he believes to sacrifice parts of the pack even if it is required for the survival of the whole."

  "So what the crap is going on then, Ash? I don't have any connections in the larger shape shifter community, I can't put my ear to the ground, and everyone here is stonewalling me. All the signs are that this should be a tightly-knit, healthy pack. Instead we've got a collection of individuals who seem nearly ready to fly apart at any instant."

  Ash sighed. "I'm not entirely sure. All I have to go on is rumors and little bits that the pack lets drop without meaning to, and the latter is so close to nothing that it's almost not even worth mentioning."

  Now it was Ash's turn to stare off into the distance. We were on watch, so I obediently focused on the nearly straight expanse of the canyon and the rims above, giving him time to think, just like he'd done for me.

  He spent several quiet minutes before finally clearing his throat.

  "OK, what I know as being absolute facts first. A year ago I wouldn't have even considered coming here to ask Alec for help. At that time Sanctuary was actually home to two packs and Alec's pack was the smaller and marginally weaker pack. There was talk for years about how it was only a matter of time until the pressure brought to bear on Alec's pack would cause the pack to splinter. The smart money seemed to be on it happening sooner rather than later, and the Coun'hij was actually quite eager for it to happen."

  "Right. Alec's one of the heirs to the royal line, right? So anything that weakens him helps secure the Coun'hij's power."

  "Yes, right in principle, but maybe wrong in degree. There are a few wolves running around in different packs that have a bit of royal blood in them, but Alec's family traces its roots back in a clear, unbroken line. If the monarchy was a possibility still, Alec would be the clear heir to the throne. Even worse, Alec's father came by all accounts very close to putting himself back on a throne. He had the largest pack since the Coun'hij came into power and it was growing at a steady clip. If the Coun'hij hadn't killed him when they did, he probably would have succeeded."