“Hello, brothers.”
If Sora objected to the fact that Callum’s greeting wasn’t gender neutral, she didn’t show it. I, for one, was feeling a little disenfranchised—not to mention outnumbered. There were easily a hundred of us in this clearing, and sleek, self-possessed Sora and I were the only females.
I was the only human.
One werewolf was dangerous. An entire pack was an immovable force, an unbeatable army.
I was outnumbered, unarmed, weak, and screwed. In that order.
“Hello.” The pack murmured the word back to Callum in unison, but I could barely parse the syllables into their meaning. There was a sort of melody to them, an inhuman, musical tone that made it sound more like a hum of energy than any kind of salutation.
“One in our number has requested our counsel,” Callum said. “Bronwyn, daughter of Ali, our ears are yours.”
Though he followed protocol to a T, his words were unlike any that this circle had heard before. First there was the fact that I was a daughter, and the fact that my familial allegiance was given by my mother’s name, and then there was the fact that everyone here knew that Ali hadn’t given birth to me, that I was an orphan.
That I hadn’t always been one of them.
The familiar sound of a spit bubble popping had me looking over my left shoulder, toward Callum’s guard, and sure enough, I noticed that Casey wasn’t the only member of my household here. The twins were present and accounted for: two babies among scores of men, a burly Were who I recognized as one of Casey’s coworkers gently cradling one in each arm.
Well, at least I wasn’t completely on my own. Though after a moment’s reflection, I wasn’t sure if that was a comfort or not. My allies in this circle consisted of a fashion-conscious teenage boy who believed in the holy power of the movie musical and two infants wearing shirts with little yellow and blue duckies on them.
An army, we were not.
Bryn. I felt a brush at the edge of my subconscious—not a word, but a gentle reminder—pushing against my hard-won psychic shields.
Right. Their ears were mine. I was supposed to be talking.
“I, Bronwyn, daughter of Ali, request the pack’s permission to speak with Chase, the Survivor.”
Since Chase didn’t have familial ties, the title seemed apt, and I thought I saw a fleck of understanding in Callum’s gaze, something that told me that he might have understood more than I’d given him credit for about my fascination with a boy who could kill me as easily as tell me the truth.
“As alpha of the Stone River Pack, I speak on behalf of my brothers in saying that I grant you these permissions, under the conditions as follow.”
I was prepared to hear this part, and I found myself strangely grateful that I was Callum’s and that he’d broken protocol enough to give me forewarning. I gave the requisite answers as he told me again about the way I would be expected to submit to those who accompanied me on my meetings, open my bond to the pack until this business was concluded, and run with them tonight.
And then Callum told me the last requirement. “In exchange for this favor, you will excuse yourself from any meetings involving the North American Senate for the next five months.”
This was … unexpected. All of Callum’s other conditions involved me becoming more a part of the pack, and being a good little pack daughter, but this one pushed me away. The Senate didn’t convene on a regular basis, and frankly, I had no desire to be there when they did. My bond with Callum connected me to his pack, and it made me smell like Stone River—and Callum—to other Weres, but I wasn’t connected to any of the other alphas on the Senate. I didn’t feel safe around them, and the artifice of bureaucracy surrounding the Senate did nothing to conceal the amount of testosterone pushing each of the alphas to test his dominance against the others. The eight of them had a gentlemen’s agreement not to challenge each other, but I didn’t relish being in a room with men nearly as strong as Callum who weren’t bound by his word to keep me safe.
“I agree to this condition, Alpha,” I said.
Was that relief on Callum’s face? My stomach twisted sharply as his features settled back into an unreadable mask, and I had a single second to wonder if he knew something that I didn’t.
Callum knew better than to leave me wondering long. His voice boomed out around me, calm and cool, saturated with power caged, and my thoughts stilled until all I saw was Callum, and all I heard were his words.
“Our conditions have been set and agreed to. The agreement is sealed.” Callum took a step toward me and dug his fingernails slightly into my bare shoulder blade—not enough to draw blood, because this time, the motion was for show and carried symbolic but not literal power. In response, I bowed my head and then reached forward, my nails digging into his flesh, putting my seal on the agreement.
Bryn.
There it was again, the push at the outside of my psyche, and I realized that this time, the reminder was less about prodding me to pay attention and more of a gentle push against my defenses.
The defenses that I’d just agreed to let down.
I bit my bottom lip and nodded, and as I closed my eyes and walked myself backward through everything I’d done over the years to close myself off from them, to protect myself, to become my own person, a sob got caught in my throat. Callum might as well have ordered me to take off my clothes and let these men watch the strip show. I would be humiliated, laid bare, and vulnerable. Naked in every way that mattered.
Bryn. The echo was calming this time, but closer—under my skin instead of on top of it—and I shuddered, but pushed forward.
I took the things that were most me, the secrets I guarded most dearly, the dreams I’d see die before I revealed them, and I folded them into a tiny ball, tucking them away in my heart, in a place that went deeper than words or fears or emotions. I pictured that ball—a tiny sphere of light—and I promised myself that it would still be intact when I came back to retrieve it, that I’d still be me when all was said and done. If Callum saw what I was doing, his amber eyes gave no hint of that knowledge, and I heard his voice in my head again.
Bryn.
Giving in to its hypnotic call, I went back in the maze of my mind as far as I could remember, to the last time I’d stood before this Crescent, four years old and following Callum’s edict to look at him, only at him, as he Marked me as his own. Ali had stood beside me then, all of twenty-one, and I wondered if she’d felt the way that I felt now. If she’d let them violate her for my sake.
And then I raised my eyes to Callum’s, just as I had then, and I told him, with every part of myself, that I was his. That I was Pack. And that, for the first time since I’d learned to close myself off from the overwhelming will of the pack, I was really theirs, too.
Communal awareness came at me from all sides, like a wave knocking me off my feet and down into the undertow. My first instinct was to fight it, to run, to slam my mental walls back up ten times stronger than they’d been before, but they pulled at me, my pack-mates—their minds, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Their togetherness. Their wolves. And even though I didn’t have another creature inside of me to respond to theirs, my body seemed completely unaware of this fact. I needed to be with them. Closer to them. Among them.
I needed to be Pack.
On some level, I knew that this was the hardest thing, the worst thing about letting them in—I had no guarantee that I’d ever be able to get rid of them, because I had no guarantee that I would ever want to. The life I’d been living was no less than sensory deprivation.
Callum’s hand was on my neck again, and I leaned into it.
Safety. Warmth. Alpha, my pack-sense told me.
Callum. Here. Mine. And then, one by one, the others came forward, placing a hand on me, touching me softly. It should have been creepy. I should have been giving lectures about my bubble and the fact that I despised having anyone stand inside it, but I wasn’t.
Instead, all I could think was that for the first time in forever, Callum wasn’t the only person who felt safe. He wasn’t the only one I could trust to protect me, to save me, to let me be me, even when it caused him no small amount of strife.
This was my family. Even the ones I didn’t like, even the ones who’d wanted me dead for as long as they’d known me—they were mine the same way Katie and Alex were. We were part of each other, and even if there was no love between us, there was something.