Page 17 of Witchwolf

I should’ve tried to learn more Japanese.

My university had required us to take four semesters of a foreign language, but I’d never beengood. In some of the more rural packs, like the one Jill and I grew up in, you were lucky if everybody spoke decent English, much less another language. As often as not, we’d gotten the point across with a snarl.

My brain didn’t work with languages, but... on second thought, maybe that was a good thing. Now, I could decide how to deal with the information logically, instead of losing myself to instinct in the heat of the moment.

Already, Jillian was pursing her lips. While I might burn hot when insulted, she burned much, much longer.

“We don’t need this,” she said, meeting my eyes steadily. “Crescent’s doing fine.We’redoing fine.”

But fine wasn’t enough. I’d dragged our pack away from our home in Idaho, been unable to provide the life they deserved for so long, and damn it all, it wasn’t happening again. I knew how fast the field could change, how quickly we could get swallowed up by some other tech firm. The second the American mage families figured out how to program, they’d try and overtake us. The only thing that’d kept us afloat this long was that the supernatural denizens of the world didn’t usually innovate in tech fields. Who knew how long that’d hold?

We had to innovate. Continue to grow. Protect the pack.

Kent scoffed, rounding on me. “What’d you expect from this? You didn’t bring in Igarashi with the assumption that they’d put aside eons of bullshit for a business deal. Whocareswhat they think of us, if we get their money?”

“Their infrastructure,” I corrected.

“You could make your own,” Dakota suggested.

But that’d take longer than we had, and working worldwide would be smoother if we showed we could collaborate globally. We weren’t just animals hiding out in the woods. We had manners.

We were respectable, damn it.

I sighed. “Kent’s right.”

Jillian’s eyebrows shot up. Maia chewed her lip. Even Dakota was looking at me like I’d lost my damn mind.

I folded my hands on the table in front of me and leaned against it until the top edge bit into my forearms. “They may not respectus, but Igarashi wouldn’t be here if they didn’t respect our business. We don’t need them to like us; we need them to help us tap a new marketplace. It won’t be the first time we’ve had to prove our value to move another step up the ladder. We can and have done it before.”

Still, no one seemed swayed by the case I made. Maia shrank, Jillian and Dakota looked incredulous, and Kent looked smugger than he had before. I hadn’t changed any minds.

But I had the final say.

“We move ahead with this deal in good faith, and hope they’ll meet us there. That’s all.”

“Fine,” Jillian snipped. She shoved out of her chair, and Dakota scrambled out behind her.

When Kent got up, he came over to clap me on the shoulder. “You’re making the right call, boss.”

I hoped so, but at the end of the day, I didn’t give a single damn what the Igarashi mages thought of us if working with them made my pack more secure.

When I left the conference room, there was one more matter I needed to settle for the day. Sure, I was exhausted, but... well, clearly, Dakota wouldn’t tell us the truth of what Igarashi had been saying if he were working for them. All he’d had to do to take advantage of us was keep his mouth shut.

Instead, he hadn’t hesitated to throw them under the bus to make sure we knew the truth. He’d even suggested rethinking whether we wanted to work with them. No ally of the Igarashi Corporation would have done that.

Tail between my legs, I walked past Jillian’s office to find Dakota’s door wide open.

I knocked anyway, and Dakota’s head popped up from behind his desk, littered with boxes of tech and supplies he hadn’t had a chance to sort out yet.

I hated how he looked at me then, his face paling, his eyes wide. Was he afraid of me? Now? The night before, he hadn’t been too scared to go home with me, to spend hours stretched out in my bed.

It couldn’t benowthat he got scared. Ashamed of letting a werewolf so close? Sure, I’d buy that, but not fearful.

“Listen,” he started, edging toward the front of his office chair, “I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn or?—”

When I held up a hand, Dakota’s mouth snapped shut.

“Do you mind if I go first?”

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