Downfall

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over the cleaning-up issue. It was Delilah I wanted dead, not the other female Wolves she’d gathered to her. If anything, I applauded them. The Kin refused female Alphas, refused those of the All Wolf cult. The Lupas deserved to rule. If you weren’t the unbeatable killer Delilah was, the males would have the female Wolves in strip clubs or worse. They’d been disgusted by the All Wolf, considering them the lowest of the low. They deserved what the femaleWolves gave them. I hoped it was nasty and inventive. Knowing Delilah, it would be.
    I hadn’t thought twice about that.
    *   *   *
    I didn’t bother reliving the fight a second time. It hadn’t been worth reliving the first.
    “Delilah didn’t waste any time sending a few messengers over in case I did miss the Howl. Messengers, assassins, whatever. I don’t think she was that serious, though, only sending three. This is most likely revenge for the fact that the birthday present I gave her when we were screwing was a bag of doggy chews.” I nudged the body curled in the Hefty bag on the floor. “We need more garbage bags. Extraduty. I had to double-bag these.”
    “You think?” Niko hung up his long leather coat with care on the wall-mount hook. His holster that was made to hold his katana along his back, under that coat, and out of sight he leaned against the wall. He slept with the katana under the bed. I didn’t judge. I slept with a gun under my pillow and a knife under my mattress. And I had, at least with the knife, since I’d been ten years old.
    “Think? About the revenge for the doggy chews or the garbage bags?”
    “You should’ve killed her, you know,” he said, shaking his head at the garbage bags of dead Wolf. “Or let me. We all knew about her ruthlessness and her ambition. We all knew this day would come when the Kin would bow before her.”
    I was actually rather proud of her for that. The Kin did not accept female Alphas and they did not accept All Wolf Alphas. Delilah was as female as they came and I didn’t regret all the times she’d proved that to me. I didn’t know why people, even the Kin, forget the female of any species is the most dangerous. They aretreacherous and fearless and won’t hesitate for a second to do what has to be done. Rules are for the weak in their eyes.
    Delilah was also All Wolf, the speciest movement that worked to prove that werewolves needed to drop the “were,” lose the ability to shift to human, and go back to what they’d been before evolution took that “looking like humans part of the time will fool them and let us catch and eat them faster” branch. All Wolf rejected evolution’s logic there. They wanted to be all wolf, all the time, no human taint. All Wolves only bred with other All Wolves to up the wolf genetic quotient every time. The results were werewolves that mostly couldn’t shift all the way to human. They were stuck halfway between human and wolf when they moved among people, with furry ears, gold eyes, sharp teeth, all usually concealed by hoodies. They didn’t mind. They had a goal, and in another hundred, five hundred, a thousand years, they’d get there. But for now, what Delilah had done. . . .
    Un-fucking-precedented.
    A female All Wolf Kin Alpha, along with the enormous number of all-female All Wolves she’d spared when taking out a random pack. It was very Amazonian, and if I’d watched
Xena
when I was a little kid, which I didn’t—fuck you very much—I’d think that was pretty goddamn hot.
    “I should’ve killed her sooner,” I agreed. I’d had at least two wide-open opportunities and every intention of doing it. She’d betrayed me, after all, and while I was used to that, no big deal really, she’d betrayed my brother and my friends, and that shit didn’t fly. “I wish I’d killed her.” And I did. For all that she fascinated me—that was nothing compared to protecting my own. “But something always came up. I hesitated the first time, for

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