The Silver Guardian Bk. 02 Ch. 07

Another huge thank you to my amazing editor Tex who did a fantastic job with this once again and is a tremendous help!

*****

Dante and Lily had been living in Hohenzollern Castle for two weeks, settling in and finding their places as Alpha King and Alpha Queen of their Pack. It had been a busy time as they settled into their roles and began getting to know their Pack and the day-to-day operations of running it. Now that they were doing such things on their own, they gained a far better appreciation of how much work their Alphas Odin and Victoria, their Mother and Father, always had to do for the O'Connor Pack.

Helpfully for them both, the Pack had been running on its own, that is without any Alphas, for a Millennium so there was room to allow them a learning curve as they stepped in and began overseeing things, so long as they didn't get too bossy or try to micromanage, neither of which tendencies were in their natures. Early on, they began meeting with the Senior Pack members who'd kept things running in their absence.

They first met with Wilhelm Thoreau, their Head of Finance, to start getting a handle on the Pack wealth, which for all practical purposes was an addition to their own personal wealth, although their own money hadn't been covering the expenses of a Castle and a Pack of 600 wolves. They they were far from being in trouble, since Dante and Lily had significant funds in their own fortune totaling about $100 Million, most of it from Lily and her inheritance, but also from the money Dante had saved over the years from living frugally (minimal compared to everything else), from his security service Triple S, and from the generous stipends they'd received when they'd been the Alpha Heirs of their original O'Connor Pack.

Triple S was still running and even doing a good business, but due to his Royal duties and preparing for the upcoming War, Dante had had to leave it controlled by some of his prior Pack members who were running it now, and who periodically checked in with Dante and forwarded him a portion of their profits.

There was no longer any point in keeping their own financial resources separate from their Pack's since they had ultimate control over both pools anyway, so Wilhelm had accommodatingly merged them before reporting back. But when he did report back with a Balance Sheet for the combined total, Lily and Dante nearly collapsed in shock.

"As you know, your Majesties..." he began.

"If you please Wilhelm," Lily interrupted him, "in private we prefer to be informal. Just call us just Dante and Lily, if you'd be so kind."

"Thank you, your... Lily. I shall do so." he replied. "So to proceed. As you know, your Pack, the Order of Fenrir, has been rebuilding its wealth ever since the tragedy when the Royal Bloodline was betrayed and killed off. Financially we have done modestly well, and a thousand years is a long time. So as of today, in addition to the hundred million we're now counting as belonging to your Pack, you two have direct control over funds that in U.S. Dollars is right around three billion dollars. That's billion with a 'B'."

The fledgling Royals both gasped in amazement.

"So much!" Dante said. "Although as you say, a thousand years is a long time. Although between interest, investments and growth I can see how such a vast fortune could have been amassed, but it's still mind boggling."

"That's so wonderful!" Lily added. "So what you're saying really, is that going forward money will never be a problem for us; that our children and descendants will always be well taken care of."

Dante pointed out, "While it's a staggering amount Lily, it's not unlimited. Don't forget we have a Castle to run and a Pack to support. And of course there's the War, and wars are expensive."

"Lily and Dante, you misunderstand me," interjected Wilhelm. "The three billion one hundred million we've mentioned so far is your discretionary fund; it's set aside for your personal use, not for Pack expenses or the War unless you so choose, of course. The entire liquid assets: stocks, bonds and cash, of the Royal Pack are worth a tad over thirty billion American Dollars, not counting your discretionary fund, the worth of the businesses we own on every continent save Antarctica, and real property such as the Castle we're sitting in and various properties in the region our Pack uses for domiciles.

"This too may in theory be spent in manners of your choosing since as our Royalty you report to nobody but yourselves and to our Goddess Luna, but its purpose is to benefit the Pack. And as you point out Dante, there's the War. But our winning the War will most certainly benefit the Pack. But the bottom line is still that with only reasonably adequate management of these funds, the Pack should always be self-sufficient and never have to struggle financially.

"But, as they say, the devil is in the details. I've been managing our investments for the past forty-three years since my predecessor retired, and I like to think I'm pretty good at it. But I welcome your oversight; I would hate for you ever to suspect I might be fiddling the books for my own benefit."

Dante laughed. "Thanks to one of Luna's gifts to me, that will never be an issue, Wilhelm; if you ever did anything dishonest related to the Pack, I'd be able to tell the next time I saw you. So I already know you're as straight an arrow as they come, and Lily and I can trust you with our lives. Perhaps not in battle, that isn't your forte, but with our finances you have our absolute trust. But with that said, we'd still like to know some of the ins and outs. I'm reasonably competent at managing money, and Lily is a genius at it; so we may be able to make the odd helpful suggestion from time to time."

"That sounds excellent; then let's give you two an initial look, shall we? As they say, the devil is in the details."

With that, Wilhelm began pulling out balance sheets, income and expense statements and cash flow statements, explaining, "although we manage the Pack's fortune as if it were a non-profit since there are no shareholders wanting some of the profits, we don't bother with statements of functional expenses; those would only be helpful if we were courting donors, which we aren't."

Dante's eyes were starting to glaze over. "Do you what he's talking about, sweetheart?"

Lily gave him an indulgent smile. "Yes, my love, it's bean counter jargon. Don't worry, it's all good."

As Wilhelm continued his briefing he touched on a number of major points. It took an incredible amount of money each month just to support the Pack. The upkeep and operations of the Castle alone took a large amount of money, as did all the stipends for the 600 Pack members. (Business expenses were huge, but they didn't appear on the financial statements of the Pack, since the businesses were all corporations in their own right, owned by the Pack. And these were for-profit corporations, since the Pack took a good portion of the profits.) Other expenses included the upkeep of their large fleet of vehicles: jets, propeller planes, helicopters, cars, trucks, motorcycles and smaller numbers of many more. There were also food and clothing expenses, education expenses, medical expenses... even what were categorized as miscellaneous expenses went through a small fortune.

So their fortune needed to be vast, but only as a precaution against hard times. The Pack had the good fortune to be able to operate on the profits of all their collective businesses and the returns from their investments alone. A profit and loss statement Wilhelm was happy to point out showed a Net Gain of three hundred million dollars in March of this year alone.

Part of Dante and Lily's responsibility, primarily Lily's, would be to evaluate the financial reports provided by Wilhelm on a weekly basis and to sign off on everything. Given Wilhelm's long history of successfully shepherding the financial health of the Pack she didn't feel the need to check details nearly to the degree that she knew Victoria did for the O'Connor Pack, but she wanted to keep a weather eye on things so that whenever she spotted something that could perhaps be improved going forward, she could discuss it with Wilhelm. As time progressed, Lily found it mildly surprising that Wilhelm was so open about discussing possible changes, considering that he and his accounting staff had been running things financial unsupervised for so long. He really was a gem.

Part of Lily's daily responsibilities was to discuss the operations of the Castle with their Head of House Edna Volksdotter who supervised the staff maintaining the upkeep, cleaning and operations of the Castle and grounds. Edna worked closely with their Head Chef and Head of Kitchen Tobias Farnhelm, who with his staff provided food for the entire population living and working in the Castle and was also Dante and Lily's personal chef. He was an absolute culinary genius and not only kept the Pack well fed with tasty, nourishing food, but also kept Lily and Dante spoiled with an ever-increasing repertoire of their favorite delicacies, and always with an eye to their health and wellbeing.

It was no surprise to anyone that Dante took responsibility for the Pack's military training in all its facets: the Betas and the elite Royal Guard, the Hellhounds. These three groups of warriors were rather like the various branches of a nation's armed forces in that they were proficient in different specialties and the types of missions they were best at performing. But although he was unstoppable like no other on a battlefield, he had the wisdom to accept that he was leading a Pack of remarkably proficient and knowledgeable warriors and he gave credit where it was due. He regularly received counsel from Lily in military matters and from their Chief Bodyguard and General of their forces, Astrid. Both Astrid and Lily also received counsel in making decisions, speaking with the Pack Elders on a weekly basis.

In judicial matters, everyone in the pack had such esprit des corps that criminal matters were never an issue; however there were disagreements that required adjudicating fairly often. Major disputes within the Pack were handled by Lily and Dante together, while Astrid and her Lieutenants Hilde, Bryn and Freydis settled the smaller ones. With so much on their plates, Lily and Dante were kept very busy each day as they came up to speed in their leadership of the Order of Fenrir.

Due to all their recent changes and because of their last-minute decision to relocate to Germany for the remainder of Lily's pregnancy, the monthly Guardians Council meeting had been postponed for a little while. The next meeting was scheduled for tomorrow, and it had been a challenge for William and his new team to get all the Alphas the secure equipment necessary for the virtual meeting. Their numbers had grown tremendously because of each of the original eight Packs' recruitment efforts added to Dante and Lily's own efforts. They were now up to forty Packs, which had finally eclipsed Viktor's forces, since a majority of the two hundred Packs were still uncommitted, placing them in a position of dominant power in North America. With the return of the Silver Guardian and the lost bloodline the majority of Packs that had been quietly approached were eager to align themselves under Dante and Lily's rule, as it was obvious they were the ones carrying out Luna's will.

That afternoon Dante and Lily were in their office going through some Pack paperwork and making some mundane decisions as was now routine for them. Lily leaned back and sighed.

"This is so very different from when it was just the seven of us traveling around in our jet, recruiting and executing operations against Viktor, isn't it baby?"

Dante smiled at his mate.

"Yes it is, baby, although we were busy then and we still are now, just in completely different ways. In a way, the War has been put on hold temporarily, though I'm sure Viktor hasn't slowed down in the least. We still have the Council meeting tomorrow, and progress is still being made, but for now there's a pause on the active operations we're directly involved with. But this is what it means to be Alphas, and it's really the meat and potatoes of what we need to be doing.

"When the time comes for us to get serious again about the War, which it will soon, we'll be able to delegate much of this to our Pack Heads and Senior wolves and Elders temporarily, after all they did it successfully without Alphas for a thousand years, but in time this will become the new norm, at least for a while. Eventually, and I'm guessing shortly after we wrap up the North American War, we'll become busy with fighting the world wide War to unite our race. Based on that one tiny slip of the tongue from Viktor that Roman Stutkoph informed us of in Quebec City, it looks like our greater enemy is in Russia. Though we don't know anything beyond just that tidbit yet." [No dear reader, you haven't forgotten anything; this is the first time we've mentioned this slip; more later, although not in this Chapter.]

Lily winced as she stretched her belly and placed her hands on it.

"The little beasties are moving again. They're getting so active lately. It could be as little as a week until they're here; I'm so excited to meet them. I'm also looking forward to not being so uncomfortable with how big I am. I feel like a beached whale."

Dante frowned.

"Lily you listen to me, you're heavily pregnant and about to give birth, you're not a beached whale and I don't want you putting yourself down like that. You're more beautiful now than you've ever been before, and it's because you're an expectant mother and the most beautiful woman in the world to me. I don't want to hear you saying things like that ever again."

Lily smiled at her mate, Dante could always make her feel better and she loved just how special he treated her.

"I'm sorry baby, you're right; I know you find me beautiful and I don't want to take away from that. But really I wasn't; I'm just so uncomfortable right now, and so ready for them to be here and I feel so big. But I promise I won't say things like that again."

Dante motioned for Lily to come around the desk and sit on his lap, which she did.

"I love you so much baby, and I too am so very excited to meet our children. They will be here soon: you've already begun experiencing pre-labor contractions. It's only a short time now, and we'll welcome them together."

Lily was getting hungry again as she always seemed to be during these past several weeks, and through the Pack bond she called for her assistant. While Astrid still acted as a part-time assistant to the Alphas in some regards, she had her own responsibilities as General of their forces and it had quickly become apparent that Dante and Lily needed their own dedicated assistants. Following some suggestions from Astrid, two junior Omega wolves were selected for the task. Dante's assistant was a younger adult Omega named Marcus Hoffstedder, and Lily's was Marcus' mate, who was a kind and lovely young wolf named Stephanie Hoffstedder. They both showed strong aptitudes for organization and time management, as well as each of them being very sharp and having lots of energy. They also didn't have any cubs themselves yet, so they could focus on assisting Dante and Lily. Marcus and Stephanie were thrilled to be given such a prestigious role in the Pack; it was an honor that neither felt they deserved, but they worked hard to be worthy of. The only restriction was that even though as Pack members they had access to the Royals' first-floor office, they couldn't go any further upstairs without an escort. And when Lily asked Astrid to expand their clearance, she insisted that for security reasons their residential quarters needed to be Hellhounds only. It wasn't personal, she too thought highly of the couple, but she was adamant on the point. She did, however, bend to the extent that on specific occasions when Dante or Lily wished to meet with one of them over a meal in their living room/library, a Hellhound would be allowed to escort them up there upon specific request. And no, it would very definitely not be appropriate for one of the Royals to escort them upstairs. They may be Commanders in Chief, but some breaches of security were unthinkable. Lily and Dante agreed to comply, but in private they had to chuckle at their closest friend being so hidebound.

Stephanie walked upstairs and into the office (unescorted) and smiled at the loving couple; she was always so happy to see how in love her King and Queen were and how amazing they were not only with her and her husband, but with the entire Pack. Even with their astounding powers and earth-changing destiny, they never treated her and Marcus as underlings, but as dear friends doing them much-appreciated favors. She and her mate abided by the traditional forms of address of course, even though they'd been invited not to.

"Yes my Queen, what may I assist you with?"

Lily smiled at the young wolf.

"Thanks for coming, Stephanie. I'm getting hungry again, as I always seem to be lately, and the little Prince and Princess are restless. Could you have some food delivered to the office, please? Once again, I can't wait until dinner tonight to eat."

Stephanie smiled kindly at her, understanding her plight.

"Of course, my Queen, I'll head down to the kitchen immediately and bring up some food shortly. My King, do you need anything while I'm there?"

Dante shook his head no.

"Thank you Stephanie, but I'm fine for now; I'll save myself for dinner; Tobias is sure to make something wonderful for us all, and I can wait."

Stephanie bowed slightly and left the office. Lily turned to Dante and spoke to him.

"I wish Stephanie and Marcus would call us by our names and not be so formal, but they both have flat out refused as a show of their respect."

Dante smiled.

"Yes, they have, the dear things. It's one of the aspects of being Alpha King and Alpha Queen we both find so difficult. We aren't used to it, and I'm not sure we ever will be. But it makes them and the rest of our Pack happy, so I guess we'll just have to adjust as best we can."

Lily got up and returned to her chair as they each resumed their work. They'd spent some time decorating their office and suite with some of the pictures they'd taken together. Just as in their office in Montana, Lily had a picture of a shirtless and sweaty Dante hanging above his desk that she liked to glance up at and admire frequently, and Dante had a sexy picture of Lily leaning against his Chevelle above hers that he did the same with. They'd taken some time to personalize their areas and make them feel more like home for them. They were building their nest and getting ready for their new family.

Several hours later Astrid arrived to escort them to dinner in the Great Hall. Tonight Chef Tobias had prepared several bacon-wrapped Filet Mignon steaks for each of them, served with garlic whipped potatoes, half a French baguette each, and pan-fried asparagus in a wine and balsamic vinegar reduction sauce. It was heavenly and melted in their mouths, as they hungrily wolfed down the food piled high on their plates. Throughout the delicious meal they spoke with Astrid and William and the Elders and other Hellhounds who were seated at their table. They liked to touch base and catch up with the running of and social life of the Pack every chance they could get.

Soon after cleaning her plate Lily began getting tired again, and Dante had Astrid escort them back to their suite so they could retire for the night.

***

Dante surged up through the earth, clawing his way to the surface. As he emerged and stood, he found himself on a familiar-looking silver plain with great silver forests and mountains all around him, under a starlit sky with the full Moon closer than he'd ever seen it from earth.