Sora snorted and looked at me. “Neither should she.”
They’re going to tell us to stop, I realized.
And then we’ll have to stop, he replied.
Neither of us wanted to. I wanted him in my head. I wanted to be in his, and in the second before Sora made the order official, the two of us joined together mentally, images passing from his mind to mine.
Dark alley.
Grease stains on his pants.
Shadows behind him.
Low, silky voice.
Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
My thoughts bled over to his. The man I’d called Daddy. The woman who’d been my mother before Ali. And siblings—I’d had siblings, hadn’t I? And then came the knock at the door, and a man.
A man with a wolf.
Man killed Mommy.
Wolf killed Daddy.
And then they started looking for me.
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
“Stop it. Both of you. Anything that is said will be said out loud. That’s an order.”
Radio silence fell between me and Chase, but my head was still a mess of his thoughts and mine and the things I’d shown him, because the orders I’d been given forbade me from talking about them out loud.
“So,” I said out loud. “Prancer bit you. You survived.”
“That about covers it.”
“And I think we’re just about done here,” Sora said.
“Callum said we had an hour,” I reminded her.
“Trust my judgment on this one, Bryn. You don’t have much of a choice.”
It’s for your own good, silly girl.
I was pretty sure that she didn’t mean for me to hear that.
“He had a white star on his forehead,” Chase said, and his voice took on the tone of the shadows missing from his eyes. “It was the last thing I saw before I blacked out. Prancer’s star.”
I was paralyzed, my heart pounding viciously within my frozen body. I was suddenly very aware of my own blood, the way it pumped through my veins, and how easily it would have been for my position and Chase’s to be reversed.
He had a white star on his forehead.
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
I thought I would throw up, but I didn’t. “They’re the same. Prancer and the Big Bad Wolf.”
“Bryn,” Sora warned, but that wasn’t an order. It wasn’t. And I didn’t have to listen to it.
“The man who hurt you and the man who hurt me—”
“I told you not to talk about that, Bryn.” That, from Casey, who seemed terrified of giving me another order, for fear that I would disobey.
I’d promised Ali, and so had he. I wouldn’t do anything stupid. Casey wouldn’t let me get hurt. But I was hurt.
I was hurting.
Come out, come out, wherever you are. …
And then they were there in my head. The pack. All of them—they were there, tugging at my psyche, drowning out Chase, willing me to submit, to take my place, to be their daughter, their sister.
Controllable.
Their pawn.
I’ll be fine, I’d promised Ali. I won’t do anything stupid, I’d sworn to Devon. But they hadn’t known—I couldn’t believe for a second that either of them had known the full truth of what Callum had been hiding from me these past few months. He hadn’t just been keeping me away from Chase, making me work myself to the bone for a few minutes in his presence.
He hadn’t been preparing me for anything.
He’d been masking the big picture, hiding the truth. I could feel my body going numb, my brain detaching from it, as the ball of things I’d once been exploded in my mind, drowning out everything else. The man who’d attacked Chase and the one who’d killed my family were one and the same. It was eight kinds of impossible, and every single one of them urged me forward.
Fight.
I could fight this. I could fight everything Callum had forced on me in the name of keeping me safe. I could pull against the leash choking me back, the orders Sora was yelling at me.
Trapped.
A familiar haze descended on me. Uncontrollable. Unknowable.
Trapped.
Fight
Blood.
“This meeting is over,” Sora said, reaching for my arm, and that was the last straw. She couldn’t touch me. Not to keep me from Chase. Not to keep me from thinking thoughts that the pack didn’t want me to think.
Not to keep me from the truth.
Not now. Not ever.
Obey. Obey. Obey.
Submit. Submit. Submit.
My pack-sense went into overload, but when Sora tried to haul me to my feet, she made a critical error, because there was only one thing stronger than my tie to the pack, and that was the drive to be safe. To escape.
I sensed him coming. I sensed him coming, and I ran, and I hid.
And now Sora’s hand was on my shoulder, and they’d lied to me. All of them. My peripheral vision went first, and then the darkness circled in, red and rough, like blood splattered on the wall, as I watched from under the sink.
Obey. Fight. Trapped. Submit.
Survive.
There was the order that mattered. The only one. I leapt from the couch, the darkness closing in all around me, and my guards were so surprised at the show of outright disobedience that they didn’t react quickly enough. Not quickly enough to press their will onto mine, or quickly enough to keep me from bashing through one order after another after another, with the fury and ferocity of an animal cornered and caged.
I leapt at Chase, barreling toward him, and he caught me and held on so tight that I could feel my arms bruising, but it didn’t matter.
We were touching.
They’d told us not to touch, and we were touching.
My parents got bit. They didn’t survive. Callum killed the wolf who did it before he got to me. Only I guess he didn’t. Kill him. Not really.
More passing between us. Feelings: anger-hate-fear-love-hope, words, and scattered images. I was in Chase’s mind. He was in mine. I couldn’t see a thing. Not even his face.
Trapped. Fight. They’re going to take me away. Have to—have to—
Sora, Lance, and Casey jumped to their feet—I couldn’t see them, too red, too much red—and Chase pulled me closer. “Mine,” he growled.
“Let her go.”
“No,” I said, forcing my body to follow my commands, grinding my jaw and forcing the world to settle back into place in front of my eyes. “Don’t.”
Everything I’d known my entire life was a lie. The person—the monster—who’d killed my family was still out there, and Callum knew. He knew and he’d kept it from me, kept Chase from me—not because he was dangerous, not because of the Rabid in his mind.
Because together, we would have figured it out.
“Let her go. Now.”
The air crackled with Lance’s dominance. I hadn’t realized how strong he was, how close to alpha himself, and the fact that he rarely spoke gave his words more power than they would have had otherwise. Chase’s wolf responded to the order, pausing, growling, backing down.
His fingers loosened around my arms.
OBEY. OBEY. OBEY.
It was overwhelming. Suffocating. Crushing. I felt Chase’s panic, and somehow, that rid me of mine. My vision was perfect, because his was becoming cloudy. My thoughts weren’t scrambled, because his were.
Trapped, I could hear him thinking. Fight. Bryn.
I recognized the madness, saw him losing control, bit by bit and piece by piece, and I remembered what I’d done to Devon when I’d lost myself to a similar directive. When I’d been trapped with nowhere else to go.
If he attacked Lance, they’d kill him.
Fight.
I couldn’t lose myself to the adrenaline, the need to get the two of us out of there and away. One of us had to stay in control.
It had to be me.
Look at me, I thought, fighting back my haze
and his. Only at me, Chase.
I could have shut down my bond to the pack, could have put back up some excuse for a mental block, but I didn’t. Instead, my body threatening to seize with the effort it took to keep my basest, most vicious instincts from taking over, I gathered everything that existed between me and the pack, everything that made me one of them, every invisible tendril that tied me to my wolf-brothers, and I shoved it toward Chase.
Mine, I thought.
Trapped. Fight. Survive.
Mine.
There was a whoosh, like all of the air had been instantaneously sucked out of the room, and then there was silence, the pack roaring at me from a great distance, unheard. Silence.
Silence, and Chase.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?” CASEY’S WORDS WERE sharp, but the expression on his face was closer to horrified. “What did the two of you do?”
Chase looked at Casey and then at me. My panic and Chase’s were gone, and in its place, there was something dynamic and warm weaving its way through my body and through his, pulling us together, inch by inch.
“I don’t have to answer,” Chase said, puzzled. “Normally, when they ask me something, I have to answer.” He flicked his head to the side. “It’s there, still. I can feel them. Callum. Wolf. Pack. I can almost hear them, but it’s different.” He leaned forward and buried his nose in my hair, breathing me in. “It’s you.”
“She reformed their bonds.” Sora’s voice was dull. “They’re each other’s first, and Pack second.” I felt her prowling near me psychically, testing the limits of our bond, trying to undo whatever it was that I’d done.
“That’s not possible,” Lance said, exchanging a look with Sora, one that reminded me that they had hundreds of years’ experience reading the ins and outs of each other’s expressions. “Is it?”
“Mine,” Chase said, rubbing his cheek against the side of my neck. I shivered, the touch between us electrifying.
“Mine,” I agreed, burying my hand in his hair, “but in a non-freaky, non-ownership, we-both-retain-our-independence kind of way.” I nudged Chase. “Right?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
In retrospect, it was probably a very good thing that he hadn’t been born a Were.
“They’re coming.” Sora again, her voice just as emotionless.
“Who?” I asked.
“Anyone close enough to feel what just happened,” Sora replied. She closed her eyes, sensing them, and I wondered if I could still do the same—if I tried. “Marcus. The Collins brothers. Everyone your age but Devon. Some of the wives.”
Casey breathed in sharply. “This is bad.”
A low, rumbling sound emanated from Lance’s chest.
Very bad, I translated for Chase.
Holding me this tightly, he couldn’t understand how anything between us could be bad. Not when it felt so right. Unfortunately—or maybe fortunately—I was human enough that the warm hum between us, the feel of his skin on mine, didn’t convince me that we were safe. We were together, but we were also screwed.
Especially me.
The survival instinct that had led me to do whatever it was that I’d just done wasn’t worth much more than spit. How many of Callum’s conditions had I broken here? I’d not only disobeyed the wolves I was supposed to be submitting to, I’d challenged their dominance over me and over Chase and somehow rewired things to weaken it. I’d taken the bond—which I’d agreed to open so that I could come here—and instead of shutting it back off, I’d channeled it into something new. The pack was still connected to me, and I was still connected to them, but that was filtered through the overwhelming, all-absorbing sameness that flowed from me to Chase and back again.
I’d approached Callum as a member of the pack, I’d disobeyed him as a member of the pack, and from the slightly green tone to Casey’s skin and the fact that Sora wasn’t yelling at me, I knew what that meant.
I was dead.
Ali and Devon would never, ever forgive me for this. Worse, they’d never forgive Callum.
“No,” Chase growled, standing up and shoving me behind him. “They won’t hurt you. I won’t let them.”
“You don’t have a choice, son.” Callum came into the room, stone-faced and weary. And even though the bond between us was muted, drowned out by what I now shared with Chase, I struggled to read him, to sense him, to know what he was thinking, and it came to me.
You don’t have a choice, son. And neither do I.
Pack Justice wasn’t pretty. Like wolves in the wild, Weres who challenged the alpha had to be beaten into submission, or removed altogether. I’d seen grown men torn nearly to pieces for doing less than I’d done here today. They healed. Eventually. Because there wasn’t much beyond a silver bullet or decapitation that a werewolf couldn’t heal from.
But me?
Not good. So, so not good.
“I don’t regret it.” I whispered the words and thought Callum would have a coronary. “You should have told me.”
Of all people, Callum should have told me. He knew me. He’d seen what the Rabid had done to me, and he’d let me go to bed each night, year after year, thinking the monster who’d killed my family was dead.
I shouldn’t have had to find out from someone else that the safety I’d felt in this pack was a lie. That the Rabid was still out there, attacking people. Attacking Chase.
My Chase.
Callum didn’t respond to me. He ignored me. Looked right through me, like I wasn’t even there. Like I was already dead.
“Sora?” he said, his voice deceptively mild. “A moment, if you please?”
Sora nodded, her face a match in every way for his. Callum’s eyes flicked toward Lance and Casey. “Let no one near her. We’ll have justice, but I’m the alpha here, and it will be on my word. Anyone who puts so much as a single mark on her before I say to dies.”
The words knocked the breath out of me.
Bryn? Chase’s voice was tentative in my mind. He wanted to protect me. His wolf wanted to protect me. They wanted to be near me. They didn’t understand why Callum’s words shocked me to my core when my life was already at stake.
“He’s bound by his word,” I murmured, leaning into Chase’s back, pressing my face into his shirt. Callum couldn’t make idle death threats. If anyone harmed me, he’d have to kill them.
Good, Chase’s wolf snuffed. He would help Callum kill anyone else who touched me.
“You couldn’t just leave well enough alone, could you? You couldn’t trust—even this once—that somebody knows better than you. You act without thinking, you always act without thinking, and now—” Casey cut off. “Do you know what this is going to do to Ali?”
Tears sprang to my own eyes, but I couldn’t keep the smart-mouthed answer off my lips. “Well, I think it’s a safe bet that you’ll be sleeping on the couch.”
Casey turned and slammed his fist into Callum’s coffee table, and it split, right down the center. Chase growled, his upper lip curling, his eyes dilating into a swirl of colors.
“It’s okay,” I told him. We’re okay.
He didn’t like Casey yelling at me and wanted to tear into him for violence—even directed at a piece of furniture—so close to …
Oh no, I thought. He did not just think the word mate.
Then again, I kind of had bigger things to worry about than defining my whatever-this-was with Chase. Like the fact that the front door had just been kicked inward, and Weres were already pouring in.
“Outside!” Lance yelled, and even though his dominance no longer had an effect on me, I could sense it, and I could see the effect it had on the others. The others—all of them, yelling and growling and muttering—backed out of the house.
“Anyone who hurts the girl without Callum’s specific permission dies,” Lance said. “This is the word of the alpha.”
“I can’t believe this.” Marcus sneered from just outside the threshold of the door, bloodlust in his
eyes, his face flushed. “She broke faith with the pack, and he’s protecting her!”
“He’s doing what needs to be done,” Lance said. “He always does. That’s why he’s the alpha. Do you doubt his authority?”
I read the words unspoken in that question—do you want to challenge him? Marcus was questioning Callum’s judgment. He was playing hopscotch with the line of insubordination, and if he so much as blinked, that would be enough for Callum’s dominance to be called into question.
Enough that Callum would have to kill him to prove a point.
“No,” Marcus snarled. “I don’t doubt the alpha’s authority.”
“Do you challenge it?” Lance took a step toward him, and Marcus bowed his head slightly, his neck arching into a rounded hook.
“No.”
Beside me, Chase was vibrating with fury, his muscles held in check as much by my control as his. Marcus wanted to hurt me. Chase could smell it. His wolf could taste it in the air. And—I pressed further into his mind—there was something familiar about Marcus. About his hatred. About how much he would have enjoyed hurting me.
Chase knew these things. He’d seen them before, in other people, back when he was human.
What Chase knew, I knew. The sensation would have been overwhelming, had I had the luxury of being overwhelmed. Chase was doing a decent job at keeping his wolf under control, but I could feel the charge on his skin, could feel his anger as millions of pinprick shocks on my own, and I could feel his beast stirring.
Chase arched his back, and if I’d thought he was luminescent before, that didn’t hold a candle to the power pouring off him now.
“Shhhhhh,” I found myself murmuring to him. “Just breathe. You’re okay. I’m okay. We’re okay.”
I needed him to hold it together. I needed, I realized, for him to be safe, no matter what happened to me.
You can’t fight them, I said. No matter what they do to me, you can’t fight them.
He whirled around to face me, zero space in between us.
“Can’t I?”
“No.”
No.
The two of us fought our own little dominance battle—Chase and his wolf on one side, me on the other, the bond between us heating up and bringing us closer in conflict than we’d been up to now.