Yet those very benefits were my first clue that leaving the council probably wouldn’t be as easy as it sounded. Malone might not want me sitting on his council, but he was never going to be willing give up his influence over the largest territory in the country.

We probably could actually have defected when my father was still Alpha, but he would never even have considered that. He wouldn’t have abandoned his fellow council members to Malone’s poisonous influence and emerging dictatorship.

Di Carlo’s response confirmed my own conclusion. “Even if they were willing to let you remove your Pride from the council’s collective influence—and they won’t be—there’s a reason the council exists. We band together because there’s strength in numbers. Because in its unperverted state, the council ensures representative government and a pooling of resources and ideas that benefits everyone.”

“Yes, but the operative word there is unperverted, and right now, you guys are operating under the thumb of the biggest power-pervert ever to swish his tail in the U.S. He’s like Hitler with fur.”

My uncle looked startled by the odd mental image, but then he nodded acknowledgment of my point. “Yes, but the solution to that problem is to remove Calvin Malone, not to remove the south-central Pride.”

He was right. My separatist fantasy was pleasant, but fleeting. After all, the whole reason I was willing to take over leadership of the Pride in the first place was to make our hidden world a better, safer place—Marc had been right about that—and I couldn’t do that if I separated us from that world.

I glanced at first Taylor, then Di Carlo, before narrowing my eyes at my uncle, searching his face for the truth. “But you don’t really think he’s going to let me into the boys’ club…?”

“No. But I think you have to ask him to, anyway.” Uncle Rick drew in a deep breath, then met my gaze with the same steel-hardened expression I’d seen on my mother—his sister—many, many times. He was about to tell me the truth, even though I wasn’t going to like it. “We tried to fight our way out of this and failed. Malone’s still very much alive, still very much in power, and still heavily armed, if Alex was telling the truth about the other cache of guns. And we’re not ready for a second-wave attack yet. Not with your dad lying cold on the bed in there, and most of our men out of reach.”

“Not to mention the severe lack of our new allies…” Marc added, kneeling next to me with the first-aid kit in hand.

I nodded slowly, as the truth sank in. “So, I have to go beg for a time-out to give us a chance to regroup. Even if that means giving Malone the opportunity to ban me from the clubhouse.”

“Exactly.” Di Carlo nodded firmly.

My uncle sat up straight. “Malone refusing to acknowledge you right now is a given. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you go in there and make the best possible impression on the rest of them, so that after the funeral, you stand a chance of winning them over and evening the odds against us a bit. Even after Malone’s gone—assuming we can actually get rid of him—we’re all going to have to work with his current allies, so the fewer enemies we make at this point in the war, the better prepared we’ll be to fight later.”

I considered for a moment, trying to sort through the barrage of new information and nonchoices. From the outside looking in, I’d always thought my father had a brilliant array of options spread before him—the luxury of choice—but now that I stood in his shoes, it was obvious that an Alpha had no more options than I’d had as an enforcer. And based on this first small sampling, every one of them sucked. Even worse, each choice he made carried life-or-death consequences.

I’d just stepped out of the kiddie pool and into the deep end, with no floaties. And drowning was not an option.

“Okay, I’m in. I can play nice, even if he won’t.” I tried not to notice Marc threading the long, curved suture needle as I forced my gaze back to my uncle. “So…what’s first?”

Uncle Rick glanced at his fellow Alphas, each of whom could only shrug. Then his focus returned to me. “To my knowledge, replacing an Alpha has never gone quite like this before, so all we can really do is treat this like the ascension of any other Alpha, while acknowledging that there are necessarily going to be some differences.”

Such as the new Alpha flashing the entire room a peek at her inner thighs, which couldn’t be helped, with Marc preparing to sew me up. Not that the sight of flesh was new to anyone, but Alphas seldom wore sheer, lace-trimmed underwear to formal meetings.

And something told me that was just the first of many differences we’d soon discover between my father’s administrative style and mine.

“Okay, I’m at your disposal.” I tried not to flinch when Marc leaned over me and the needle bit into the tender skin around my largest gash. I’d opted to go without anesthesia because all we had was alcohol, and while that would have numbed more than one kind of pain, I couldn’t afford fuzzy logic.

“Right.” Uncle Rick stood, and his nervous pacing reminded me of my father—and of the fact that I couldn’t move around to burn some of my own nervous energy. “In order to be officially acknowledged as Alpha by your Pride, the territory’s enforcers must unanimously accept you by formally swearing their loyalty to you.”

I’d known about the oath, of course. I’d seen it given every time my father hired a new enforcer, and I’d sworn the same oath myself when I’d been officially hired. But this was a little different, both because of the scale—all the enforcers would have to swear, rather than just one or two new recruits—and because without the loyalty of dedicated enforcers, an Alpha could never hope to properly lead a Pride, much less hold on to it in the face of opposition. And I’d probably break records in that last department.