Wolf and Punishment (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 1) (5 page)

When Vince’s float plane pulled up to the dock outside the three-story kingdom house in Interior Alaska, she happily waved to her younger sister who was waiting for her.

Tu, as usual, was determined to stand out against the mostly white, gray, and black Alaska landscape. And she did just that, dressed in a long-sleeved, neon pink mini-dress with yellow leggings and electric blue moon boots. Technically, Tu was the shortest person in their family at only five-foot-six, but with her huge Afro and bright smile, it was obvious she was also their family’s biggest personality.

“Hey, Vince!” Tu called out to their cousin before addressing her own sister. Vince was nineteen to Tu’s seventeen, which officially made them the only black teenagers currently residing in Wolf Lake. The son of their mother’s brother (who was also their father’s beta) Vince had always shared a special connection with Tu. They were bosom buddies in a way only nearly same-aged cousins could be.

So of course Vince answered her greeting with a farting sound, which cracked Tu up.

But her laughter died abruptly when she pulled Janelle in for a hug. She sniffed her oldest sister hard before saying, loud enough for Vince to hear, “Hey, did you know somebody gave Daddy a brand new snowmobile because—really, I don’t know why, some boring business stuff—but he says I can have it! Can you believe it? It’s in the garage, and it is
sweet
. You have got to come look at it before we go in the house.”

Janelle’s heart slid into her stomach. She’d scrubbed her entire body like a fiend before leaving the hotel room, had even gone so far as to douche, and that still hadn’t been enough to save her from her little sister’s super nose. Tu’s sense of smell was so good, she could correctly identify all of the ingredients in a dish with just one sniff. She could also identify where a wolf came from down to the town he was born in… and, apparently, exactly what her sister had been up to.

“You hooked up with some guy from Bad Wolf?!?!” Tu exclaimed, as soon as they were safely in the metal outhouse where all of the Alaska family’s snowmobiles were kept. And safely out of earshot of Vince. “What the hell?”

“Is it really that bad?” Janelle asked, sniffing but getting no trace of Mag on her skin.

“No, it’s really faint. But you never douche, I mean why would you? And guys from Bad Wolf have a really distinct smell. So I put the two scents together.”

Janelle started to cover her face with her hands, but then didn’t, because that would displace her make-up, including the concealer she’d slathered on to cover up the dark circles under her eyes—the result of not getting much sleep the night before. “Is it bad enough that Mom and Dad would notice?”

“No,” answered Tu. “Not unless they actually put their noses to your crotch and checked, which I doubt they’d do because why would their most perfect daughter ever hook up with a wolf she wasn’t pledged to? Does this guy’s name also start with a J? Because I was kind of looking forward to calling you and Jeffrey J & J after the wedding.”

Hot guilt pebbled in her mind as she thought about how disappointed her parents would be if they ever discovered what she’d done last night.

“It was nothing. Just a little fun. It will never happened again, and I still plan to marry Joffrey—I mean Jeffrey.” Janelle said.

“Yeah, right. Just a little fun, so little, you had to douche it all out of you.”

“Tu, could we not…?” Janelle dug deep into her reserve of patience. “Just please don’t tell Mom and Dad, okay? They’ll freak. You know they will.”

“What’s in it for me?”

Janelle exhaled a huff of air. “How about you don’t tell them you smell a guy from Bad Wolf on me, and I won’t counter with ‘How do you know what guys from Bad Wolf smell like, Tu? Also, why are you so familiar with the masking properties of douche?’”

Tu glared at her for a bit, but eventually gave in with a suck of her teeth. “Fine, but the next time the parents are out of the house, I expect details. Lots of them. And he better have been hotter than Jeffrey.”

Oh, he was so much hotter than Jeffrey, Janelle thought to herself, but not because of the way he looked. She suspected Mag would actually lose out in a beauty contest to her fiancé. The Wyoming prince was classically handsome, like a storybook prince come to life, while Mag’s beauty was all in how not classically good looking he was. His nose was too big, his eyes too knowing, and his face—well, it was brutish, with skin that was rough to the touch, as if his beard started growing back as soon as he shaved it, leaving him with a permanent five o’clock shadow.

He couldn’t be compared to the perennially clean-shaven Jeffrey. But when it came to who was hotter, there was no contest. Mag looked at her, and she wanted to touch him and even more, be touched by him. She could still feel his hands on her body hours later. Jeffrey and Janelle took very pretty pictures together. Mag and Janelle had set that hotel bed on fire. Really, there was no comparison.

But Janelle didn’t share any of these ruminations with her sister. She just said, “We better get inside. Mom and Dad will wonder where we are.”

Her parents, Tikaani and Wilma, the King and Queen of Alaska, greeted them with bear hugs and kisses, a warm welcome Janelle appreciated after the unexpected detour to their unheated snowmobile shed. And if her parents suspected anything, it wasn’t at all evident in the way her stout father shook her like a grizzly before setting her back down.

“There she is, my favorite daughter!” The king, who was actually a couple inches shorter than his oldest child, declared in a voice so jovial and kind, it would have been impossible for either of his other daughters to take offence. He let Janelle out of his bear hug to ask, “Why’d you leave me home alone with these two? They kept outvoting me on the television. Had to watch that stupid
Rap Star Wives
show last night and there was an episode of
Columbo
on.”

“Don’t even start, Dad,” Tu said beside Janelle. “Columbo is, like, a million years old and comes on a million times a day. Plus, there are, like, no black people here! If I didn’t have reality shows, I’d never see anybody who looked like me. Don’t you care about the other half or our culture?”

Their tall mother, the former Princess of Detroit, laughed and pecked Janelle on the cheek, before scooping her youngest daughter into her arms. “And that’s why you’re
my
favorite daughter,” her mom said, giving Tu a big squeeze.

The king snorted. “If you’re basing black culture on
Rap Star Wives
, I suggest you embrace your Eskimo half harder, because at least we’re not running all over Alaska creating drama for drama’s sake everywhere we go.”

Tu rolled her eyes at her tragically unhip father. “No, we’re having snowmobile races and running bets on when Wolf Lake will freeze over, because it’s so insanely boring here.”

“
Columbo
is a classic.”

“
Columbo
is boring, and you know it’s probably streaming on Netflix. Too bad you won’t let us get a subscription!”

And so it went, on and on, until Janelle begged out of the conversation, saying she needed a nap. Tu could have been less snotty about pointing it out, but she hadn’t been lying. Wolf Lake was pretty dull, with not much to do, which meant arguments like the one Tikaani and Tu were having could go on for hours without anything more interesting to come along and interrupt it.

Janelle went up to her room on the second floor, glad that unlike a lot of royal families, they didn’t provide rooms for their servants on the premises. The last thing she needed was to have to keep what she called “The Perfect Princess Act” going beyond the first floor of the house. “Hi, everyone! Yes, I had a terrific time! I’m so happy to be a princess and to represent the crown everywhere I go, even in my own home where I’m expected to be flawless all the time.”

Her perpetually pleasant expression—the one she’d practiced in the mirror at her mother’s behest after the one time she’d been caught looking disinterested at an inner-pack basketball game—dropped as soon as the door closed behind her.

While Janelle was relieved her parents hadn’t suspected anything, she was also weirdly deflated. She collapsed onto a tasteful gray settee and stared out her bedroom’s huge picture window. The similarly laid out guest bedrooms one floor up and at the front of the house overlooked Wolf Lake. But all of the princess’s bedrooms were situated at the back of the house and therefore, overlooked the rest of their little kingdom town.

Theirs was the only three-story structure in Wolf Lake, but the rest of the kingdom town was equally pretty. Under her grandfather’s rule, Wolf Lake had been redesigned to put one in mind of a postcard, with cozy one- and two-level yellow cedar log cabins dotting both sides of the main road. Some were large and sprawling, some were positively tiny, with only one or two bedrooms inside, but they all featured two of the same elements: yellow cedar shipped in from Wolf Lake Lumber—the kingdom-owned company started by her great-great grandfather and the source of the family wealth before they embraced oil—and stonework chimneys made from stones found in the mountains surrounding the town.

Despite its secluded location, the town was warm and inviting, the ideal place to live for simple but rich wolves who lived simple but rich lives with the occasional business meeting thrown in for the town’s many oil executive fathers. And the smaller houses belonged to a rotating coterie of servants, many of whom had inherited their jobs as housekeepers, caretakers, and shopkeepers from their parents.

The carillon bells on the quaint schoolhouse chimed and Janelle watched young wolves between the ages of six and eighteen come spilling out of the yellow cedar building. They all walked home without parental chaperones. Unlike in human towns, no one here worried about their pups walking home alone in Wolf Lake. Their sleepy kingdom town had no crime, no place where a kid could get lost. Wolf Lake was nothing less than idyllic.

So why did she feel so dissatisfied with it all of sudden? And why did her space now feel less like a room with a lovely view, and more like she’d been placed on permanent display, like a pretty fish in a yellow cedar and stone fishbowl?

She turned away from the window and went over to her desk. It was also made of yellow cedar and built into the side-wall of her bedroom, which meant it had been used by generations of princesses before her.

However, none of the other princesses had been half black. Nor had they possessed nearly as many vision boards as she did. Four large cork boards in all, one for the Christmas party the kingdom hosted every year; one for the upcoming Arctic Wolf Games in January; one for the Midnight Sun festival in late June; and one for the king’s birthday party in early August. She picked up the Christmas party vision board and stared at the glossy images and post-it notes that covered it, trying to feel the same sense of purpose that usually came with planning a huge event.

But her usual excitement for party throwing stayed on mute, while that weird sense of dissatisfaction seemed to accumulate every second she spent staring at the board, trying to get re-inspired.

Her eyes went to the small file cabinet beside her desk, the one that held her copy of the pledge agreement she’d signed to mate and marry Jeffrey. Why were her hands suddenly itching to pull it out and read it over again? What was she hoping to find?

A loophole.

The answer came back to her on a tremulous whisper. One she forced herself to ignore.

No, that contract should stay exactly where it is
, she chastised herself.

The sound of her phone vibrating inside the purse she’d set down on the settee ripped her away from her potentially traitorous thoughts. Grateful for the interruption, she walked over and pulled it out. It was an Alaska number, but one she didn’t recognize.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hey, Janelle, it’s Mag.”

“Oh! Hi, Mag,” she said, and just like that, all her frustration and dissatisfaction disappeared, replaced by unexpected elation at hearing his voice again so soon after they'd parted.

“You sound surprised to hear from me.”

Her first thought was to deny any such thing, like the perfect and respectful princess she been trained to be, but she found herself admitting, “Um, I figured you were one of those guys who waited two or three days to call if you called at all.”

“Yeah, well…”

“You’re not one of those guys?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you’re calling me.”

Long pause, then, “So you got home okay? No delays or anything?”

An obvious subject change, but Janelle went with it. “No, it was a great flight. No delays.”

“Your family was glad to see you?”

“Yes, but now they’re downstairs with my youngest sister arguing about what to watch on TV tonight.”

“You don’t all have your own TVs in your bedrooms? I thought that’s what all the rich
amaroks
did these days.”

“No, my dad’s rule is we all watch TV together, or we don’t watch TV at all. He’s big on family time, but it leads to a lot of arguments, especially with my other sister off at college.”

“You got
two
sisters?” he said. “Wow. Your dad must be stoked.”

He sounded impressed and Janelle wasn’t surprised. She-wolves could only get pregnant when they went into heat, and many she-wolves only went into heat once. If a mated couple had two pups, they considered it a blessing. Three pups or more, and the she-wolf was practically considered a fertility rock star.

But in the royal family’s case… “He’d have been much happier if at least one of us had been a boy, so he could pass on his… name,” she confessed to Mag, careful not say the word “crown.” “But I think he’s finally gotten over that.” Especially now that his oldest daughter had agreed to a lucrative pledge deal that would keep him in power for a long time to come, she added to herself.

Her stomach soured at the thought of her pledge agreement, and suddenly it was her turn to change the subject. “How about your family? I believe you mentioned a brother?”