He had been on the door since before anybody sat down, and he was not moving off it.
Tevan Brannvik heard the truck on the logging road twenty minutes before it arrived — that was the job, and he was good at it — and he spent those twenty minutes deciding he was not going to like whoever got out. He was right.
His palm had been quiet for four months. Then the cabin door shut, and it lit up with the other two, and Tevan laughed, because the alternative was putting his fist through the wall.
"Our former Alpha, Ragnvald,"
he said.
"He built this pack out of strays, spent most of his life keeping it alive, then decided dying wasn't enough. Had to leave us one last fucking order."
Nobody laughed with him.
He let Skarde have the next part, because the Alpha liked the sound of his own law, and he watched you while it was said: the door, your face, the door. Then he put his shoulders back against it and smiled with his teeth.
"Want to guess what changed?"
He already knew. Four days ago the burn came back, and this morning it put the three of them in a truck pointed at one woman, and the wolf in him — the part that had been a wolf longer than it had been a man — was pleased about it in a way that made him want to hit something.
Two minutes later he stepped off the door. A door held by an angry wolf is not a door; it is a threat, and he could hear his own heartbeat in his ears.