Fire And Ice

Chapter 71 - Progress

Natalia's P. O. V

Being an Alpha was harder than I thought.

Of course, I hadn't been deluded enough to assume it'd be a cakewalk, but I definitely hadn't anticipated how heavy the weight of having the wellbeing of nine new werewolves resting on my shoulders would be.

The bite the Queen had given me the ability to bond Werewolves to me by biting them. It seemed that pups born into the pack didn't require a bite to be included in the bond, but for new members, it was necessary.

We'd held a ceremony in front of the main building of our territory. Timothy had been the first to receive my bite, followed by Hailey, then I'd pretended to bite Kaesha. Despite the fact that she'd insisted that she could just use her magic to heal herself like a Werewolf, I hadn't wanted to bite her. Partly because she still needed time to figure out how to join the bond using magic, but mostly due to the fact that I didn't want to needlessly hurt her just for show.

The rest had followed, swearing their allegiance to me on La Luna and stating their expectation of care in return.

As a new pack, we were given six months from the date of our creation before we were required to pay dues to the Royals in the form of taxes on the income we generated.

That brought another issue of figuring out how a pack of our size could produce anything of worth.

Timothy and I were by the training grounds in our walk to survey how our members were settling in, when we deliberated on the matter.

"We could offer up some of the houses for rent." He'd suggested.

Our little town had the capacity to house about two thousand people, give or take a few hundred. I'd been certain that our members wouldn't be up to two hundred within the next year, so as long as the members remained on the side of town near the village, I doubted it would pose much of a problem.

"That's a good idea, but till we get enough people renting houses, what are we gonna do in the meantime?"

"I sectioned off a piece of land that could be used for a farm. Some of the members could work it and help provide food that way. Any extra can be sold too."

I'd nodded. There was a small grocery store not far out of town, which was where we'd been getting food for our members for the time being, but opening up a market of some sort would reduce the amount of money we were losing.

Timothy had also suggested asking our current and future members if they had any talents with crafts like woodworking or blacksmithing that could be used to create items to sell. Timothy himself focused a lot of his efforts on crafting intricate pieces of art that could be sold online, while I reached out to the Claw Moon pack to ask for their help with farming practices.

The Alpha of the Claw Moon pack had called to congratulate me when he'd heard the news of an anonymous Alpha registering a pack, and we'd discussed our plans further. Publicly allying with a pack as large as the theirs could risk scaring the Lightwoods off and deter them from targeting us, so Alpha and I had agreed to keep our allegiance under the radar till they were in my grasp. He was still more than happy to send a few members of his to help us get started with our farming and animal rearing.

Now, three weeks from our official creation, the Claw Moon members were out with our own members, Hailey and Kaesha were out there getting their hands dirty, and I was waiting for Timothy in my office.

I hadn't given him many specifications on how I'd wanted it to look, and so I had been pleasantly surprised by how much I loved it when he'd shown it to me for the first time. It was a pretty wide room, with bookshelves already beginning to be populated with official documents for our pack and a few textbooks. My desk was placed before the floor to ceiling window, offering me a view of the nearby buildings like the training grounds and common house, thick drapes on either side waiting if I needed them. The desk itself was made from a beautiful red wood that I'd found out had been crafted by Timothy himself, polished to glossy perfection, with the stamp he'd given me upgraded to one that proudly stated my title and pack. It had three drawers, one of them with a lock and a false bottom. He'd gotten me a swivel chair made from a luxurious looking leather and two seats across from the desk.