Page 98 of Wolf Blood

He shook his head slowly before refocusing on his conversation.

I knew what the raised eyebrow was about.

Harper.

Her scent would be all over me.

That satisfied me more than I should admit.

I could've washed her off my skin before the meeting, but I'd wanted to smell like her.

After we sealed our mate bond, our scents would be intertwined to the point where everyone we met would smell that we were a pair.

Fuck, yes.

Maverick took the spinning chair next to mine, and cleared his throat. "I got a call from our team up at the estate last night. Three of the Wilder Pack enforcers showed with a tent and camped out on the lawn. When our people asked them what they were there for, they said their Alpha sent them as challengers."

My forehead creased.

Challengers?

Zane had no interest in Maverick's position. He didn't even want fucking wi-fi. He wasn't going to take over the Alpha Pack.

It was no secret that Zane was probably the only werewolf alive who could genuinely take Maverick down. Most of the men from his pack were good, too, but Mav could read his opponent in a way no one but Zane could. Neither of them would admit it, but they used their power over mental links during difficult fights too, which was why they could survive pretty much any challenge.

No one would take either of them down without decades of experience managing and controlling a mental link the size of their packs', and even more time spent fighting.

"What kind of challengers?" Ocean, one of our female lead enforcers, asked. She had tan skin, and white-blonde hair that reminded me of Harper's the first time I met her.

"They're going to challenge everyone I beat," Mav said.

No one said a word for a long moment.

"They're going to kill anyone who fights you," Lorenzo stated. He was the smallest of our male enforcers, with pale skin and brown hair, but he was the smartest.

"Yup." Mav nodded."They're publicly siding with us on the vampire issue. This is a good thing."

Averygood thing.

Before Maverick abducted Bloom, he rarely fought in challenges. Since then, he'd had more than a hundred in just a few months.

There were another hundred on the list of upcoming fights, as well. We'd reduced the challenges allowed to three a day over every weekend, so the number was growing faster than it was shrinking.

The Wilder Pack's intervention would change that.

Quickly.

Mav had only killed a handful of his challengers. The ones who hated vampires to the point where they would've been a danger to his mate.

Maverick wasn't violent unless he had to be. If we started killing all of his challengers ourselves, there would've been a fucking uprising.

No one expected civility from our rural equivalent, though.With the Wilder wolves executing anyone who challenged him and lost, the number would drop drastically.

The rural packs and the city packs would all abandon the tirade against vampires sooner rather than later, if the Wilders publicly sided with us. It would be necessary, for the sake of their survival.

"Should we do anything to stop them?" Ocean asked. "It would look bad if we let them kill half a dozen challengers without intervening."

"No," I said flatly. "We don't intervene."