Even if a lot of them now thought she must be crazy, suicidal, or both.

She looked down, plucking at the comforter. “I don’t want to go, Dad.”

“Then stay here! You keep running off the way you do, you’re going to get hurt. I try to keep things sane here, Lyra. The Thorn have worked very hard at not being the savages our kind is seen as. But some of your suitors are going to use any means to get at you, and you know that!”

She rolled her eyes, recognizing the riff from so many of their arguments lately. “Dad, I’ve got suitors from every pack in the eastern US sniffing at my heels. Some of whom, I will have you know, have gotten plenty aggressive on our own territory. And off of it,” she added, thinking of Mark. His pack was neighbor to her own, and the two groups congregated from time to time. She hoped she wouldn’t have to see him again, but the chances of that sort of luck were slim to none.

Dorien’s expression turned thunderous as his protective instinct kicked in. “Who—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lyra interjected, cutting him off. Dorien’s face said that it damn well did matter, but Lyra didn’t really want to get into it. Instead, she continued, “I have no intention of picking up some stray loser who wants me just because I’m an Alpha’s daughter, Dad. I don’t like being the way in. Especially because when it comes to being your Second, I’m the best candidate this pack has. I learned from you, even if you weren’t trying to teach me.”

Dorien reached out, tucking a wild curl behind her ear with a tenderness that made Lyra want to weep. She knew this was killing him. But if she didn’t step up, Eric would surely become the new Alpha to the pack. If her father was traditional with welcome little dashes of forward thinking—a little old-fashioned but beloved—her cousin was conservative with a capital “C,” an authoritarian puritan isolationist with a massive stick up his ass. Sideways.

Not only would he not move the Thorn forward, he seemed destined to push the pack back at least a hundred years. It was something Lyra couldn’t bear to endure. Not when she had so many ideas to bring the Thorn into the twenty-first century… even if they came kicking and screaming. It was adapt or die out. Sadly, with the pack shrinking in recent years, the latter had begun to be whispered about as a possibility.

There would have to be a female Alpha somewhere eventually, she reasoned. A new voice, a new point of view. Why not here?

Why not her?

Her father seemed to have plenty of ideas on that subject himself.

“I’m asking you one last time, Lyra. Step back. There’s no shame in withdrawing from the Proving. Hell, I don’t even know if the other males will consent to fight you.”

“They have to,” Lyra replied. “I looked it up in the histories. I’m to be treated just like the male candidates.”

Dorien’s brows went up. “I don’t recall that in the histories, though it’s been a while since I had to look to them. When was this?”

Lyra felt her shoulders beginning to hunch defensively and forced herself to straighten. “In 1759. Pack of the Broken Arrow. There was a female wolf in that Proving.”

“And?”

“And… well, she didn’t succeed, but she made it pretty far.”

He zeroed in immediately on what she wasn’t saying. “How was she treated when she fell, then?”

“Um. I… I think it was something like being torn apart by the remaining candidates once she’d fallen.” Lyra mumbled it as quickly as she could, but Dorien’s sharp intake of breath indicated he’d heard her just fine.

“Damn it, Lyra!” he snapped, his patience for her obviously already exhausted for the day. “This can’t end well. You’ll get that, or worse, especially with your cousin likely to lead the pack! I’m not going to be able to save you either. Do you understand that? No one will!”

Lyra did understand, better than he knew. She thought of Mark, the determination in his eyes, his strength. A single wolf, and she couldn’t even manage him. No amount of bravado was going to make up for her limitations in strength and size, and Lyra knew it. But there had to be a way. Jaden appeared in her mind’s eye, taking Mark out in a series of quick moves that looked effortless. It wasn’t exactly inspiring, considering she couldn’t move like a vampire and likely never would. But Jaden had used something other than raw power to win, and that was encouraging… if she could find a way to emulate it.

Lyra was tough. No one in the pack would argue that. But she hadn’t been trained to fight like the males. She’d had to pick that up herself. Dorien’s refusal to teach her still cut deep.

“I’ll figure it out. I always do,” Lyra said. What else could she say? She had no plan, and she certainly had no one willing to help her. But every time she considered backing down from what seemed an increasingly untenable position, she thought of the silent, humorless figure of her cousin. His stark view of right and wrong, his unnerving ability to quote whole passages from the histories of any given year and then apply it to a given situation made her nervous, to say the least. Hell, he made a lot of people nervous. To be born without a sense of humor wasn’t normal. And then there were the things Simon had told her he’d heard about him. If even a small amount of those rumors were true, her quiet, creepy cousin had plenty of ugliness lurking just beneath the surface.

Eric Black had always put her hackles up. But as it stood, he would be Second unless she found a way to stop it. And he would be the ruin of the pack.

Dorien dragged a hand through russet-colored waves of hair only slightly touched with gray and looked upward, as though the mystical wolf gods themselves might descend from on high to help with his unruly daughter.

“I know it seems unfair to you,” he said, and Lyra could hear the way he tried to modulate his tone, to hide the fear and anger running beneath them. “But like it or not, we survive through strength and ferocity. The vampires have it in for us, and half the damned time we have it in for each other. The pack looks to the Alpha to be the strongest of all. You’re plenty strong, and very clever, Lyra. But physically, you couldn’t take down even the larger males in our own pack. That matters.”

“I could learn if you’d train me properly. Any human would think this is bullshit. They treat their women as equals,” Lyra snapped, hating the old argument, the one that always seemed to poison their conversations anymore.

“The humans don’t have to live by fang and claw the way we do!” Dorien snarled. “And my training you wouldn’t have done a bit of good. You versus a two-hundred-pound wolf, each of you fighting the same, is never going to come out in your favor. Never.”

“You don’t know that,” Lyra snapped. Dorien dug his fingers into his hair and looked like he wanted to bite something.

“Damn it, Lyra, why can’t you just accept the way things are instead of fighting so hard?” He stopped, closed his eyes, and collected himself. It was an action Lyra had seen plenty of times when she was the subject of his discussion. She knew he was counting to ten so he didn’t blow. Sure enough, when his eyes opened, his voice had softened, though it was thick with emotion.

“You’ve never seen a Proving, sweetheart. You think you can be ready for it, but no one ever is. All you’ll have is your wits and brute strength. You’ve got the first in spades, but the other…” He trailed off for a moment.

“I already lost your mother. Don’t you leave me too.”

It hurt her. And it made Lyra angry, because he knew it hurt her, even though he meant it. When she focused on the latter, Lyra managed to cool off a little. But as far as bending, she just couldn’t.

“Female or not, tradition or not, Alpha is my birthright,” she said quietly. “It’s in my blood. If I give up, the Thorn will get Eric. You know it, Dad.”

Dorien exhaled loudly through his nose. He looked at her, and the bleakness in his eyes brought on a fresh wave of guilt despite her best efforts. “You haven’t heard a word I said, have you? You can’t win. Rules are rules, and if Eric wins the Proving I’ll take him. He’s a Black, and he’s got the strength to prove it. I know he’s a bit… dour. It’s hard to believe he’s my brother’s boy sometimes… Gerik would be sad, I think, to know how he came up with Mara’s family. But I can work with him, mold him—”

“He’s a waste of a werewolf, and there’ll be no changing him,” Lyra burst out. “He’s so obsessed with rules that he can’t see the benefit of change. He wants everything to stay the same, harsh punishment for anyone who bucks the system… and besides that, he’s twisted.”

Dorien looked at her sharply. “You don’t know that. I’ve heard whisperings, same as you, Lyra, but there’s never been any proof.”

“By the time you have proof that he enjoys hunting human women in his spare time, the humans will be on our doorstep,” Lyra snapped. “And if you want to talk about running off, he’s made himself pretty scarce lately too. So the solution is to hand him the pack on a silver platter? At least I still care, even if I’ve had to put my life on hold because of these stupid traditions!”

“I didn’t make the Thorn; I only keep it, Lyra. You’ve heard it for enough years to know how it works. Eric will win the Proving on his own merits or not,” Dorien said, rising from the bed. “And as for you, better a life on hold than over.”

He headed for the door, but Lyra’s question stopped him in his tracks. She knew Dorien had been hoping that her signing up for the Proving had been a stunt, a way of expressing her anger with pack tradition when it came to the relentless marginalizing of their women. So she decided to let him know she meant it.

No matter what.

“Do you plan to try and stop me from competing?” she asked. A simple question, but a loaded one. Lyra tensed in anticipation of his answer. A great deal rode on this. And if he said yes, then she knew she might have no options but leaving. The very idea was like a knife in her heart. Still, if she couldn’t be free to choose her destiny here, then life was too short to stay encased in amber.