Page 1 of Broken Arranged Mate
Chapter 1 - Oren
“You seem uncomfortable.”
I shift in my seat and resist the urge to scowl at the journalist sitting across from me. On the other side of the room, Landon—my new assistant—stands with his back against the wall, tablet clutched to his chest. The kid is young, but he insisted on working with me, and he had a pretty strong referral.
“I’m ready to get started,” I say, trying to sound cheerier than I feel. I’ve been told I don’t come across as ‘friendly,’ and apparently, it’s a struggle for the members of my pack to trust a leader who never smiles.
They should know better. My father smiled all the time.
“Alright,” the journalist says, voice peppy, and I try to remember her name—maybe it was Grace—as she says, “then let’s begin. First off, I want to thank you for sitting down with me today. Your office is beautiful.”
I never smile, but right now, I have to suppress a grimace.Thisoffice was my father’s office. Even the sight of the chair, pushed away from the desk casually, made me want to be sick when I first saw it.
It’s a huge, luxurious room, built to match the rest of the place, with towering bookshelves full of tomes my father never read. The desk is long and wide, made of shining mahogany, and a fireplace crackles in the corner, the light playing off the oiled leather chairs to the left.
“Thank you,” I finally manage, resisting the urge to glance at the clock. This interview is important. I agreed to it, even. But I’ve never been much of a talker, and I’m not looking forwardto confronting my family drama—and the current disarray of the pack—with a stranger.
But I can’t sit down with every member of my pack and talk to them individually, get them to trust me. So this is the next best bet.
“First, I was sorry to hear about the death of your father, our previous alpha leader.”
“I’m not,” the words come out quickly, and when Landon’s eyes widen, I realize maybe it wasn’t the right move. Oh, well. It was the truth.
“You’re not,” she says, somewhat breathless, a flash moving through her expression—the excitement of a journalist? She can’t be much younger than me, but I feel I’ve aged decades in the last year alone, and her mannerisms strike me as being youthful, out of reach. “Would you mind telling me why?”
I suck in a breath, thinking about the ledger I just finished reviewing, the exorbitant amounts of money pilfered away by my father during his time as the alpha leader. The abuse this pack faced under his thumb. Leaning forward, I think about what I’ve learned about leadership, how I want to present myself to this pack.
“In any pack, wolves will disagree,” I begin, watching Grace’s eyes flicker with brief confusion, but pushing on. This isn’t about my father, not really—and I’d rather take a different tack to keep from airing out my dirty laundry. “The purpose of the alpha is to filter through those conflicts, the opinions, the will of his kin, and condense it down to the decisions that best serve everybody. Jerrod Blacklock was not that kind of leader. His leadership was selfish, authoritarian, a leech on the body of the pack. And so, his passing ultimately benefits the Grayhides.”
Grace’s eyes widen, her pen flying over her notebook. “So, would you say that he deserved…what happened to him?”
Her words are vague, either because she’s not sure what happened or has enough tact not to mention it in front of the man’s son.
Few people saw what happened to my father that day in the ballroom, the fleshy, discolored mess that he had become. I bite my tongue and swallow down the bile that rises in my throat, pushing the memory away like I always do.
“No wolf on the planet deserves what happened to him.”
“Can you clarify what, exactly, happened that day?”
I’d rather not.
“Nobody is precisely sure what happened. I can give you my best guess based on evidence recovered after the fact. Through a copious amount of drugs and use of powerful magic, Mhairi Argent of the Ambersky pack subdued my father, using him as a figurehead while she made decisions in the background, playing at being alpha leader.”
In fact, she was doing a much better job at it than he had done, already starting to fix some of the problems he’d created. The only issue? She was a raging fucking sociopath.
I don’t touch on the other things I’ve heard about Mhairi—the fact that she, apparently, tried to kidnap her own daughter, or that she stole Amanzite from the Ambersky, leaving them practically defenseless until it was recovered.
Betraying her own pack for a taste of power.
If I told this journalist about those things, it might make me look a bit better, but I won’t betray my allyship with the Ambersky pack for it. Ambersky’s luna is Mhairi’s only surviving daughter, and though I’m sure she’s not happy about hermother’s choices, that doesn’t mean she wants to see them in print for the whole world to see.
Grace is still writing like her life depends on it, and when she comes up for air, she says, breathlessly, “That’s…sorry, I’m struggling to wrap my head around it.”
I say nothing, giving her time to work on it, and she clears her throat, says, “I covered the succession ceremony, but I imagine readers may like an inside view of the situation. What was it like, receiving a blessing from the only remaining shifter in the original Grayhide line?”
It was fine. Aidan is a good man—if a little excited—but not cut out for leadership.
After killing Mhairi Argent, I had yielded leadership to him. It was a charged moment, and I hadn’t thought it through. But Aidan ended up not wanting that role, not wanting to lead a pack.
