“Is Chase talking to you?” Sora asked me. “Silently?”
I wasn’t sure how she could tell. Maybe she read it in my change in posture, as my body shifted itself toward him, all of its own accord. Maybe she saw it in my face, or felt it through the pack-bond. In any case, I didn’t want to answer the question, but Sora pushed at me, coming forward and placing her hands on my knees, leaning over me in a way that made me lean back.
She was dominant. It wasn’t just a word. It wasn’t just a concept. It was real, and at the moment, I couldn’t have lied to her if I’d wanted to, agreement or no. “Yes.”
“He shouldn’t be able to do that,” Casey said, startled. “Not yet.”
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.