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“I am Geri, third in line to the throne.”

“Noah is my third in line. I think if you ask him he will say he did not see what I saw either. Third in line to be Nimir-Raj, or Ulfric, is not the same as being the real thing.”

I fought not to give Micah the look of gratitude that I wanted to give him. We were still deep in bluff territory, and not safely out the other side yet.

“You can’t mean to share your lupa with two other men,” Paris said. She’d pushed her way to stand in front of Richard, with her back to me. She was either being insulting, or stupid. Maybe both.

Richard looked down at her, and it wasn’t a friendly look. Somehow I didn’t think Paris ever had a very good shot at being lupa, not with Richard in charge anyway. “What I and my lupa do, or don’t do, is none of your business.”

I saw her back stiffen, as if he’d hit her, and maybe he had hit her pride. She’d really believed she could seduce him into picking her. I could have told her that sex wasn’t the key to Richard’s heart. He liked it well enough, but it wasn’t one of his top priorities, not if it interfered with other things that were. It had been the same mistake that Raina had made with him, or one of the mistakes she’d made with him. Raina had never really understood Richard, either.

“You can’t just arbitrarily decide you don’t need a vote for this,” Jacob said.

“Yes,” Richard said, “I can.”

I stepped up beside Jacob. “That’s what being Ulfric means, Jacob.”

“You’re going back to a dictatorship after all the high-minded talk,” Jacob said.

“For tonight, it’s sufficient that Anita is my lupa, and that’s not going to change. We’ll discuss everything else later.”

“I say we put it to a vote whether the pack wants to go back to being a dictatorship,” Jacob said.

“If you don’t have someone set that nose, it may heal crooked,” I said.

He glared at me. “You stay out of this.”

Richard called up a man with short brown hair and a neat mustache. He shrugged a backpack off his shoulders and began taking out medical supplies. “Fix his nose,” Richard said and then turned to Sylvie. “When he’s bandaged up, pick some people and escort Jacob to the oubliette.”

There were murmurings in the crowd. One clear voice that I hadn’t heard before said, “You can’t do that.”

Richard looked up, searching the crowd, and they fell silent under his gaze. His power rolled out from him like a burning invisible fog, something that clung to your skin and made it hard to breath. They avoided his eyes; some even dropped down into submissive postures, their bodies low to the ground, eyes rolled up, arms and legs held close, making themselves seem small and defenseless, clearly asking not to be hurt.

“I am Ulfric here. If there is any among you that disagree with that, then you are free to challenge the next in line, and the next after that, until you are Freki, then declare yourself Fenrir, and you can challenge me. If you kill me then you can be Ulfric, and you can set any damn policy you want. Until that time, shut the fuck up and follow my orders.”

I don’t think I’d ever heard Richard cuss. The silence was thick enough to cut. It was Jacob who cut it, like I knew he would. He pushed the mustached doctor away impatiently, while the shorter man tried to pack his nose with what looked like gauze. “Anita shows back up, and so does your backbone. Does she kill and torture for you like Raina did for Marcus?”

Richard’s fist struck out in a blur that I couldn’t follow. It was almost magical. One moment Jacob was standing, the next moment he was on the ground with his eyes rolled back inside his head.

Richard turned to the rest of them, the dried blood decorating his nude upper body, his hair turned to spun bronze in the torchlight. His eyes had gone wolf amber, and looked more gold than normal against his darker than usual summer tan. “I thought we were people, not animals. I thought we could change the old ways and make something better. But we all felt it tonight when Anita and her leopards