I let out a ragged breath, pushing down the animal desire to howl. The scars on my hip bone felt like lines of liquid fire against my skin, but I didn’t fight it. I didn’t try to control the bond.
I let it control me.
I let them in.
I didn’t say anything to them. I let them see it for themselves: everything I thought, everything I felt. I let them sift through my mind, and with the part of me that was alpha screaming, I forced my body still, until the muscles in the back of my neck melted away, leaving my head lying on Chase’s shoulder, the way it had when he’d spent the night.
Devon nuzzled my right palm. Lake brought the tips of her fingers to touch my face. My mind and my body and every part of my being were so full of the three of them—what they were and what we were together—that there wasn’t room for anything else.
Anyone else.
Being alpha meant always being inside everyone else’s heads and never letting them inside yours, protecting the pack and never needing their protection—but it also meant that if the coven got inside my head, they’d have free access to everyone else’s.
Not anymore.
“When Chase spent the night, Archer couldn’t find me in my dreams.” I heard the words as I whispered them, felt the soft sound wrapping its way around each of their bodies. “If we’re lucky, having the three of you inside me will be enough to keep all of them out.”
And what if it’s not, Bryn? I recognized Lake’s voice in my mind, and for a split second, I saw an image of the two of us when we were eight or nine, suntanned and skinny-limbed and laughing.
I brought my hand to Lake’s and pressed my nails into the skin of her wrist, dragging them softly downward, leaving my mark.
You’re going to protect me, I told her, the way you always have, and if it doesn’t work, you’re going to protect the pack.
It wasn’t an order, but it wasn’t a question, either, because I knew them, and they knew me, and there wasn’t a single one of us who didn’t already know how this was going to end.
Lake met my eyes, her own blazing, and then left her mark on my palm. The exchange was symbolic, the kind of formality our pack had never observed, but somehow, my dominance spreading among the four of us, their inner wolves as much a presence in my mind as theirs, it seemed appropriate.
Devon.
Chase.
Two more times, my fingers laid marks into someone else’s skin. Two more times, marks were laid upon me. When we finished here, I’d go into the lion’s den to take out the lion, knowing that I wasn’t alone, that if something happened to me, my friends would take care of our pack, even if it meant hurting me.
With the wind whipping through my hair, I knelt and lifted my head to the waning moon. I breathed. They breathed. And when they Shifted, and I felt the rush of wild power, bittersweet and pure, I wondered if this time, they felt me in the same way I felt them.
If being a part of me made them just a little bit more human.
I was still alpha. I always would be, but the constant rhythm in their minds as I buried my hands in their fur wasn’t alpha. It was Bryn.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I SHOWED UP ON THE COVEN’S FRONT PORCH LOOKing every inch the runaway. My hair was a tangled mess, my clothes still smudged with forest dirt. My teeth were chattering, and I had a duffel bag slung over one shoulder.
Ali was going to kill me.
Waltzing straight into the belly of the beast wasn’t exactly a mother-approved kind of plan. In a few hours, when Ali woke up and found me gone, there would be hell to pay, and I was seriously glad that I wouldn’t be the one around to pay it. I was only about 60 percent sure that Lake and Devon would be able to keep her from charging in after me—and only the fact that my friends had open access to my mind and would know the second things went south made me rate their chances that high.
This is what Callum foresaw, I thought, willing the words to be true. I’m supposed to be here. Ali will understand that.
My friends snorted inside my head in stereo. I wasn’t convincing anybody here—not even myself.
Feeling as if my body weren’t entirely my own, I lifted my right hand, fisted it, and knocked on the wooden door. The coven had set themselves up on the far side of town, in a falling-down farmhouse that had been abandoned for years. I lifted my fist to knock again, but the door opened before I could repeat the motion. I shivered, half from the cold and half because the wolves lurking in the corners of my brain didn’t like the looks of the woman staring me directly in the eyes.
She was older than I’d expected. Werewolves aged slowly, and most of them never looked much older than their thirties, so seeing eyes that were worn around the edges and lips that had thinned with age was an unusual experience for me, especially when the owner of those eyes and lips felt alpha in a way completely at odds with the fact that she was human.
“Bryn.” She said my name like she’d been expecting me, like everything up until this point had been her way of luring me in.
“Hello.” I didn’t give her more than I had to, and I watched her face for some clue as to what was going on inside her head. “You’re Caroline’s mother.”
She smiled, and for a moment, it was easy to picture her as one of those PTA soccer moms.
“Please,” she said. “Call me Valerie.”
The expression in her eyes never changed, but I felt it the moment she reached out to my mind, like a cube of ice sliding down the length of my spine. Her smile was gentle and warm, and just looking at her made me want to smile, too.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I concentrated on the shiver that ran through my body and the sound of wolves breathing heavily in my head.
Lake and Devon and Chase.
Valerie’s smile deepened. Her eyes glittered, and without another word, she moved aside, gesturing for me to step across the splintered threshold into the house.
She’d tried to get inside my head, to push me to trust her or fear her or whatever it was she’d had in store for my emotions, and she’d failed. She knew I wasn’t really there to join them. I knew that she knew, just like I was fully cognizant of the likelihood that she would keep trying to find a way into my head. The two of us were dancing, playing chess.
I stepped across the threshold.
“I was wondering how long it would take you to come to me,” Valerie said, her voice soft, comforting. “Bridget and Archer told me that you had an episode in town. It’s only natural that you’d have questions about what you are. What we are.”