We were three miles from the ranch, stuffed into the cramped front seat of my rental car, when Abby turned to me with a familiar look in her big brown eyes. That look said she knew that curiosity would eventually kill the cat, but she really didn’t give a damn. “When was the last time you saw her?”

I squinted at the windshield as a car passed us with its brights on, though the sun hadn’t quite set. “Saw who?”

As if I didn’t know.

“Faythe. You guys have been working together to present this new resolution, right? To officially recognize a Pride made up of strays?”

A long rope of red curls fell over her shoulder, and I had to stop myself from reaching out to touch it.

“They prefer to be called ‘wildcats.’” Even though Pride cats had a slightly different definition for the same term. “But yes. Most of that’s been done over the phone, though.” Thank goodness. “If the resolution passes, we’ll be making history.”

For the first time ever, strays—werecats infected by a scratch or a bite rather than born into our world—would have a place to go for help, sanctuary, and company. They’d have an official presence and a voice. And their Pride would have a vote on the council, of equal worth to that of all the other Prides.

This potential new Pride wouldn’t have an official name until it was formally recognized, but unofficially, we were calling it the Lion’s Den.

“Working with her must be difficult for you,” Abby said.

Understatement of the millennium.

As the first female Alpha in history, Faythe was practically a legend in every shifter society on the planet. She’d shattered the glass ceiling with her notoriously hard head and ripped the no girls allowed sign from the council’s clubhouse. Faythe had paved the way, at least in theory, for every tabby who would come after her.

I, on the other hand, was the only tom in the world ever to have been dumped by a female Alpha, which had left certain members of the Territorial Council less than confident in my ability to lead. In a society where the respect an Alpha commands is crucial to the authority he wields, how were they supposed to have any confidence in me when she’d found me lacking?

Not that any of that would matter for long. My sister, Melody, was nineteen. When she married, I would be expected to train her husband so he could take over the territory with her at his side. Matrilineal inheritance had always been the norm so that our few tabbies could stay in their birth Prides, which would be run by the Alphas they chose as husbands.

Faythe had opened up new possibilities for female leadership, but the percentage of tabbies who would naturally develop into Alphas was no greater than the percentage of toms who would, and Melody… Well, my sister couldn’t even pick a bottle of lotion without asking for a second opinion.

Regardless, I was little more than a temporary guardian of my future brother-in-law’s territory.

But that was nothing Abby needed to be reminded of.

“The truly hard part is getting the other Alphas to understand the relevance of electronic communication in modern Pride leadership.” I shrugged and forced a laugh. “You’d think email was synonymous with witchcraft, if you took Paul Blackwell’s word for it.” The old fart still hand-wrote letters to his fellow Alphas on honest-to-goodness carbon paper.

“That’s not what I meant.”

She’d meant that it must have been hard having to talk to Faythe so often after she’d picked Marc over me. Abby, like everyone else, was wondering if I’d gotten over losing the love of my life. Or whether I ever would.

According to the gossip from my own enforcers, the answer was no, and it always would be. But then, according to those clowns, Faythe had only picked Marc because she couldn’t have any of them.

“So, you haven’t seen Faythe in a while?” she asked.

I turned to see that the setting sun had turned her curls into living flames. “Um, it’s been about three years, I guess.”

Three and a half, but who was counting?

“Seriously? But aren’t most council meetings still held at the Lazy S?”

I nodded, and she frowned with the realization that I couldn’t have gone so long without seeing Faythe unless I was consciously avoiding her. And that was true, but it wasn’t just Faythe I was dodging. I was avoiding every memory I’d ever made at the Lazy S, because even the good ones were bittersweet in retrospect.

Especially with Ethan gone.

“About time,” I mumbled as the gate appeared ahead, beneath a familiar capital S lying on its side. “I swear, the drive from the airport gets longer every time.”

Abby groaned, as if she’d suddenly remembered something important. “Slow down!” She dove between our seats headfirst, placing her very well-shaped and barely covered hindquarters inches from my face.

“What the hell are you doing?” I pressed on the brake as I turned off of the highway, and it took every bit of willpower I could summon not to peek into the rearview mirror for an even more intimate viewing angle of what her skirt didn’t cover. As the vehicle came to a stop, Abby settled back into her seat holding a small square box she’d dug from a bag in the back.

A ring box.

“I almost forgot,” she mumbled, as she pulled her engagement ring out and slid it onto the fourth finger of her left hand. It was a single round diamond mounted high on a slim gold band, and the damn thing caught the dying light like rays from Heaven. I had to squint to see through the reflected glare.

“Why don’t you wear it at school?” I was caught strangely off guard by the rare reminder that she had been spoken for a long time ago. Not that it mattered.

Abby frowned at her hand, which somehow looked completely different with that one simple addition. “Because Brian… It’d be hard to explain to humans.”

Hell, her engagement would be hard to explain even to most shifters, who grow up knowing about the expectations placed upon a tabby at birth.

After narrowly surviving abduction, captivity, and gang rape the summer she was seventeen, Abby’s senior year in high school was very difficult for her. A few weeks in, she’d dropped out in favor of homeschooling with her mother, and shortly after that, she’d gotten her GED. Around April of that year, her parents had sent her to the ranch to spend time with Faythe and Manx, who’d both survived similar trauma—a little less in Faythe’s case, and significantly more in Manx’s.