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.”