“It hasn’t been for quite some time,” Di Carlo pointed out. “And our failure to act won’t change that. If we start a war to get rid of Malone, we may destroy the council in the process. But if we let things continue, he’ll restructure the council to suit his own needs, effectively destroying it himself.”

“He’s already started that,” Taylor interjected, and his heavy gaze landed on me with particular weight.

“Whoa, what does that mean?” I glanced at the pot of water, then decided that food could wait. The council had met until late the night before and reconvened early in the morning, without enforcers once again. Evidently the rest of us had missed more than just the design of Malone’s new stationery.

My father took his glasses off to polish the lenses, and only once he had them back in place did he meet my gaze. “Calvin had an entire list of policy changes ready to go before the vote, and since then, he’s been introducing one after another. So far, about a third of them have passed, and each time, Paul Blackwell has been the swing vote.”

Dread clenched my stomach like an iron vise.

Unfortunately, even with the new unspoken hostility between them, Blackwell and Malone still shared a few ideological tenets, such as the belief that strays had no place within a Pride, and that a tabby’s primary responsibility is to provide her territory with its next generation. So if Blackwell could be counted upon to vote his conscience—and history had already proved that he would—he would have to support Malone in most policy changes intended to hurt me and/or Marc.

Shit. “What’s passed so far?”

“New Alphas must be approved by a simple majority of the council before they will be officially recognized,” my uncle said, his frown deepening until I thought his face would collapse in on itself.

That one could be aimed at either me or Marc, and would no doubt apply to Jace, too, if his father had any idea how much of a threat Jace had become. “Wow, they’re planning way ahead. What else passed?”

My uncle sighed. “All Prides must pay a monthly stipend to a discretionary fund that will be used to finance council business.”

“What kind of business?” Marc asked, as he drained the first skillet of beef.

“Establishing a new, permanent council headquarters, hiring new enforcers as needed…”

Anger burned in the back of my throat, where a growl itched to form. “For which Pride? Malone’s, I assume? We’re supposed to pay for him to hire new thugs? No way in he—”

“Not for him,” my father interjected, before I could complete the planned profanity. “Enforcers for the council at large, to handle any issue that involves more than one Pride. They’ll be like state troopers, to our city police.”

“That one’s a direct shot at your dad,” Uncle Rick added. “For handling the Manx issue on his own instead of turning it over to the council.”

It took real effort to make my pulse stop racing, and to keep my teeth from Shifting out of fury. “Is that it?” If those were the laws that passed with Blackwell’s vote, I could only imagine what kind of horrible proposals he’d actually found objection to.

“Those are the most threatening so far.” Di Carlo ran one hand through hair still thick and dark in his late fifties. “But we’re supposed to debate one more this afternoon….” He glanced at his fellow Alphas, none of whom seemed inclined to complete Di Carlo’s aborted sentence.

Every hair on my body stood straight up. “What? What’s the new proposal?”

Finally my father sighed and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking more pessimistic and frustrated than I’d seen him in a very long time. At least when Ethan died, he’d gotten angry. I’d much rather see him angry than discouraged. “Faythe… His new proposal says that no woman can serve as an enforcer until she’s given birth to a daughter.”

Noooo…

My uncle took one look at the horror surely clear on my face and rushed to explain. “Originally the policy said that no women should be allowed to serve, period, but Blackwell balked at that, so Malone tacked on the daughter codicil. And it looks like Blackwell’s going to support that one, too.”

Of course he was. He’d always believed that I was better suited to a diaper bag than a pair of handcuffs.

“The problem is that there’s no good way to protest that one,” Di Carlo said. “If we want to survive as a species, we do need…” His voice trailed off, but we all knew how that sentence should have ended.

I’d grown up knowing one great, pervasive truth, and had discovered another since I started working for my father. The first was that in order to survive, the south-central Pride needed me to give them children. Because of a genetic inconvenience, there were usually four to six boys born before each daughter, and like most tabbies, I was the only girl in my family. The vacancy of my womb meant the end of my family tree and extinction for my Pride. There was no way around that.

The second—equally important—was that I wanted to serve as an enforcer, and some day as an Alpha. I had yet to come up with a compromise between my own personal rock and hard place, and until I did, the council—especially now that Malone was leading it—would use that against me.

It’s not that I was opposed to the idea of having children. I never had been. However, if, when, and with whom were my decisions to make, and no one had the right to take those choices from me. But Malone had obviously found a new way to try.