It was sickening how much her best friend was in love with his mate. In fact, all the other sentinels were starting to make her gag. “Clay making goo-goo eyes at Tally, and don’t get me started on Luc and Sascha.”

Then there were the worst offenders of all—Nate and Tamsyn. How dare they still be so crazy for each other after all these years! “Should be against the law,” she snarled. She wasn’t even going to think about Vaughn and Faith.

She decided to go for a run instead.

An hour later, and deep enough in the pack’s heavily for ested territory that she couldn’t hear anything beyond the cautious whispers of nocturnal creatures moving about in the dark, she sat down on the smooth trunk of a fallen tree and blew out her breath. The truth was, she wasn’t mad at any of the sentinels or their mates. Damn, she was so crazy-happy for them it hurt. But she was jealous, too. Everyone was paired up now. Except her.

“There,” she muttered. “I admitted it. I’m a big ol’ jealous baby.”

Being a dominant female wasn’t a bad thing in changeling society. Female alphas were as common as male ones. But being a dominant female in a leopard pack where none of the dominant males pushed her buttons, that was bad. And being a dominant female in a state controlled by leopards and wolves—where only the wrong one pushed her buttons—that was extra cherry-on-top bad.

Not that she was limited to their territory—Dorian had been nudging at her to go out of state, see if she couldn’t find someone in one of the other packs, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave DarkRiver, not when things were so dicey. Sure, life had calmed down a little since the failed kidnapping attempt on Dorian’s mate, Ashaya, but it was an edgy sort of calm. Everyone was waiting for the next ripple in the pond—whether it would come from the suspiciously quiet Psy Council or the newly violent Human Alliance was anyone’s guess.