My frown deepened. “I mean, when we speak of a werewolf Alpha, I imagine them looking like the Rock,” I said, thinking of the bald-headed wrestler, “only probably hairier.” Looking at Lucien, with his otherworldly beauty, he didn’t strike me as the archetype I imagined in my head.
He chuckled and pushed his auburn curls back, which looked far too sexy for such a mundane act. “So that’s a no?”
“That’s anI don’t know,” I corrected, shrugging while trying to distract myself from any dirty thoughts by focusing on the subject at hand. “Is Remi part of the pack?”
Lucien’s face softened. “Yes, he is. Why?”
“I mean, he treated you like the cousin you are to him,” I said, my heart tugging a little at the true affection I could tell he felt toward his cousin. “I would assume an Alpha requires more ...” I bit my lip and looked away. “Respect, I guess.”
“You’re not wrong, Drew,” Lucien said, and when I hesitantly returned my eyes to him, I saw his smile was gone, the amusement on his face replaced by grim seriousness. “An Alpha demands—or rather,commands—respect from his pack members. He is the absolute ruler of the pack. His word goes, and those who do not follow his lead meet an unfortunate end. It’s similar to a dictatorship, in a way.
“However, not every Alpha is the same.” He narrowed his eyes as he made a sharp turn at a corner. “Each Alpha leads their pack as they see fit. Some ignore the Betas completely and go on to become atruedictator. Others listen to the Betas and take their advice into account when making a decision. Very few, though, consider their pack as more than a company to manage or a mere power trip, and those few see their whole pack as one big family, and treat them as such.”
For some reason, my heart ached at his words. Perhaps because I could hear a slight pain in his voice. “Seeing a pack as a family sounds lovely,” I said quietly.
“Yes, it does,” Lucien murmured. “Or rather, itis. But each leadership path the Alpha takes has its flaws. Even this one.”
I nodded, following his trail of thoughts. “A dictator Alpha is doomed to fall one way or another because of a member who’s had enough,” I said, thinking about modern human history. “But the other way around, an Alpha who sees his pack as family might not be taken seriously, or could be seen as weak.”
“You got the gist of it,” Lucien agreed. “But you forgot one: an Alpha who takes the advice of his Betas. Can you see the flaw in this one?”
Frowning, I thought about it for a few moments but came up empty. “It actually sounds like the most solid way of leadership out of the three you presented.”
“On paper, it does,” he said, and his voice tightened, “but that, too, has its flaws. That kind of Alpha could unintentionally trust their Betas to the point of blindness, and the wrong Beta could take advantage of that and manipulate the Alpha in return, thus risking the pack as a whole.”
He sounded bitter, I noticed, and his face was both grim and disgusted. And I had a hunch why. “You think this is the worst outcome of the three.”
There was no hesitation when he said, “Yes.”
When I realized he wasn’t going to elaborate on his reasoning, I let that go and asked instead, “So if every leadership way has its flaws, what is the correct way to lead a pack as an Alpha?”
Lucien smiled, but it was humorless. “A perfectly balanced blend of all three.”
I couldn’t help but be skeptical. “Is it even possible?”
“I can only hope that if I believe it enough, it will be true,” he said somewhat ominously before he suddenly tensed and said, “We’re being followed.”
Tense now as well, I glanced at the side mirror to try and see who was following us. But though it was nighttime, there were still a few cars on the highway, and I couldn’t tell which one it was.
Lucien seemed to sense my confusion because he supplied, “The silver Jeep in the leftmost lane.”
I turned to look through the driver’s side window at the Jeep in question. Its windows were tinted, and even if they weren’t, in the dim streetlights of the highway, it would be kind of hard to see who was inside.
“Are you sure they’re following us?” I asked, trying not to sound skeptical.
“Yes, I’m sure,” he said quietly. “They’ve been following us ever since we exited I-5. I wasn’t sure, either, but I felt a brush of fluxion coming from that direction.”
“Fluxion?” I asked, staring at the silver Jeep.
“Magic,” Lucien said. “There are Otherborne in that car.”
I wanted to ask what “Otherborne” were, but I felt like a broken record, asking him all these questions while we were apparently being followed.
So I swallowed that question and filed it for later before I asked, more to the point, “What are we going to do?”
“We’ll have to take a detour,” he replied, putting both his hands on the wheel. “It’s time to drive this expensive fucker to its full potential.”
My heart hammered in my chest when he suddenly pressed the pedal and the Rolls-Royce shot forward like a fucking bullet.