“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.
I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing. I just stared him down. If I’d had a moment to think on it, I probably would have realized that challenging a Were was a bad idea, even if you wore his skin nearly as tightly as your own. The last time I’d seen Chase, Callum and the Rabid had been battling it out for control of Chase’s mind. Now he was mine, and I’d been Pack long enough—Callum’s long enough—to know that in my family, we protected what was ours.
“You have to promise me.” Silently, I set my will against his, intent on having my way on this one thing. This last thing. Out loud, though, I pleaded. And finally, either because of the desperation in my voice or the unmoving, uncompromising steel baring down upon him from my side of the bond, he nodded.
It cost him everything to make the promise, and his pain hit me like a physical blow. I wanted to curl up next to him, to be closer to him, to make the pain go away. He wrapped his arms around me.
“This just figures,” Casey muttered. “Never had a boyfriend, never wanted one, forgets to even brush her hair unless Ali reminds her, and now, this. There’s just no in-between with you, is there?”
I was minutes away from being on the receiving end of terrifying and unquestionably physical retribution. Was now really the time for Casey to be complaining about my dating habits, or lack thereof?
But at the same time, he was right. There wasn’t an in-between for me. I lived at extremes. And maybe I’d die at them, too.
Right. Now.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
I was stupid, and I’d been betrayed, and I wasn’t at all sure which one was worse. I felt Callum come into the room behind me, and as he crossed it, I turned, averting my eyes to keep from looking straight at him. A second later I realized that I needn’t have bothered. It wasn’t like he was looking at me. His movements were stiff, his face unreadable. For what I could only assume was the first time in a thousand years, he looked old.
Callum said nothing to me. He just nodded at Sora, and she walked over and told Chase to move away from me.
He didn’t want to.
He wanted to stay.
To protect.
But he’d promised, and so he let go of me and I of him. “He’s safe?” I asked Sora, knowing deep down that Callum wouldn’t respond.
“Safer than you are,” Sora replied. “His disobedience was mild.”
Chase hadn’t reneged on a pact with our entire community. I had. Message received.
“What’s going to happen to me?” I didn’t want to be asking those words, but there they were.
Sora didn’t answer. She just dragged me from the house, out onto Callum’s front lawn. Callum followed, but didn’t step past the threshold of his door.
“Permissions were granted and conditions were set,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Those conditions weren’t met. Justice demands blood.”
This from Callum. The closest thing to family I had, next to Ali. The man whose Mark I bore—and would always bear—on my flesh. The man who’d lied to me for years and years. The person who for the longest time I’d looked up to most in this world.
“However,” Callum said, and that provoked a hum of grumbles that settled when the alpha demanded silence. “However, the girl is human. Her body would not recover from that which she has rightly earned, and our justice—if it is to be justice—cannot be blind. Sora will serve in my stead. She will extract our pound of flesh.”
I really, really hoped he was talking about a metaphorical pound. Ice-cold terror filled my veins, and from head to toe, I froze.
“But Sora will do so in human form, and only until the girl’s body gives out.”
Gives out?
Gives out how?
“And how will Sora know when it’s enough?” Ironically enough, that question—which was on the tip of my tongue, too—came from Marcus, his lips twisted into a colorless sneer. “Who is she to judge? The pack will be satisfied. This cannot be a slap on the wrist.” He paused and then added, “Alpha,” with what sounded like respect—probably to stave off a lesson in what challenging the alpha really meant.
“Sora will know,” Callum said, and that was all the warning I got. One moment, things were still being debated in the abstract, and the next, a circle had formed around me and Sora—Devon’s mother, pack, protector—had thrown me to the ground. I scrambled to my feet, but the next second, she came flying at me, a kick delivered to my chest. I flew backward, and there was a popping in my ears. It took me a second to recognize the sound as the cracking of my ribs.
I was lucky she hadn’t broken them in half. But somehow, I didn’t feel lucky. Again, I made my way to my feet, and again, she was upon me. Instinct said to draw my knives, but even I had more sense than that. This was as much of a reprieve as Callum could give me. If I touched silver, I’d lose it.
I’d die.
And I owed Chase more than that. I heard him howling, as if from a great distance, and I knew that he’d lost the battle for control, that he’d Shifted and that it was the wolf and not the boy who was bound now by the promise he’d made me not to interfere.
I lost my tenuous grip on that fleeting thought when Sora backhanded me, strong enough to send me down again. She rained blows down upon me, and I could feel my eyes blackening, my lips swelling, my body hopeless under the barrage.
All of Callum’s training, and this was what I was reduced to. I couldn’t fight, couldn’t resist, couldn’t do anything but let her beat me.
Survive.
The word was a whisper at the back of my throat, a ghost in my mind, maybe even an echo on the wind. I’d given into it before. I’d absorbed it, acted on it.
Survive.