Devon didn’t reply to Shay’s greeting. Instead, he turned his head slightly, deferring to me and declaring for everyone present that I was his alpha and not the other way around.
I was probably the only person present who realized that Devon’s deferral had less to do with forcing Shay to acknowledge my status, and more to do with the fact that there was something inside Devon that he couldn’t afford to let out. He wasn’t about to engage Shay, because right here, right now, with adrenaline high and the collective power of the alphas in the air, Devon had a fragile hold on the desire to introduce his fists to Shay’s jaw.
As wild and feral and vicious as the undercurrent of power all around us was, violence wasn’t an option. The men in the Senate had chosen to play by certain rules, and Devon knew them as well as I did.
Within a given pack, a person could challenge the alpha for dominance, but inter-pack aggression wasn’t allowed. Unless Shay transgressed first, Dev couldn’t take a swing at him—not without bringing the wrath of the Senate down on our entire pack. That was the reason Shay couldn’t kill me outright.
The reason he’d sent other people—first the psychics and then Lucas—to do his dirty work.
“Hello, Shay.” I stepped in between Devon and his brother. “Long time no see.”
The glint in Shay’s eyes told me beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had never expected me to survive Lucas’s challenge. He’d known I would accept the abused boy into my pack, and that as a member of my pack, Lucas would be able to do what Shay could not.
Challenge me.
I was a human, and Lucas was a Were. In a fight to the death, I shouldn’t have stood a chance. And yet, there I was. Alive. Shay had to have been wondering how.
Maybe they all were.
“Bryn.” From the way Shay said it, you would have thought it was a dirty word. “So glad you could make it.”
Like I’d had any other option. This was just Shay’s way of suggesting that my attendance here was a farce—that I wasn’t really an alpha and didn’t have the right to stand side by side with these men.
“Oh, Shay,” I said, like he was a child, one I had some level of fondness for. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
A muscle in Shay’s jaw tensed. I could get under his skin just as easily as he could get under mine.
“You said there was a problem that needed to be addressed, Shay.” Callum’s voice carried, even when he made no attempt whatsoever to make it do so. “Perhaps we should head inside to discuss?”
Callum’s suggestion was every bit as pointed as my response to Shay’s taunts, a reminder to everyone present that the Snake Bend alpha wasn’t calling the shots, that, officially, all of the alphas were on even footing.
And that, unofficially, it wasn’t even close.
“Of course,” Shay said tightly, before turning his attention back to me. “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave your protection out here, Bryn.”
Referring to Devon as my protection was an insult, implying that I couldn’t protect myself.
If Shay thought it was going to get a rise out of me, he was wrong. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m sure Devon can find some way to entertain himself.”
Dev didn’t miss a beat. Towering over everyone else there and looking every inch the werewolf warrior, he nodded austerely. “I’ve been considering teaching myself to juggle.”
Biting back a smile, I took the first step forward toward Shay’s house. Callum followed my lead, and a second later, all of the alphas were breaking off from their backup.
Alpha. Alpha. Alpha. I felt the call, heard it in the air all around us. These men were dominant. They were strong. And each and every one of them was pushing down the animal instinct to fight the others, the whisper telling them—and me—that there was only ever meant to be one.
Alpha.
If the power was this overwhelming outside, it was going to be unbearable with the entire Senate crammed into a single room, but I wasn’t intimidated, wasn’t frightened.
Something about this moment felt right. Like I belonged here. Like this was what I’d always been meant to do.
The last thing I saw, as we filed into Shay’s house, was Devon and his mother watching us go, three feet between them, miles apart.
Game on.
CHAPTER NINE
SHAY’S LIVING ROOM WAS OPEN AND LARGE, BUT where Callum’s house was made of stone and wood, Shay’s seemed to be all glass and steel: cold and sleek, with sharp edges everywhere you looked. Instead of arranging the furniture around a central hearth, the room boasted a larger-than-life conference table.
In a show of restraint, Shay didn’t seat himself at the head of the table. No one did. But from the moment a screen descended from the ceiling, it was clear that this was the Shay Show. If the performance outside had been aimed at making me feel like I didn’t belong here, this room had been constructed to make the other alphas feel like artifacts of a different time—and to remind them that in the modern world, exposure wasn’t a minor threat. It couldn’t be quarantined or contained.
“These images have already made their way to the internet.”
Shay clicked through a series of crime scene photos, each more ghastly than the last.
“Luckily, both local authorities and the person responsible for leaking these pictures seem to believe this is an isolated incident.”
Shay paused, and in the space between his words, I could hear the beating of my own heart. The sound of it—and the picture on the screen, blood spread across white walls, like someone had been finger painting with it—made me dizzy, almost nauseous.
“Local authorities are wrong.”
This time, when Shay clicked over to the next slide, the images weren’t crime scene photos, but they were just as bloody. Just as gruesome.
“These were taken last week, just outside of the southernmost portion of Snake Bend territory and just north of the Arkansas state line.”
Years of geography lessons—the kind regular girls never had to take—came pouring back into my mind. The Snake Bend territory reached from North Dakota over to Minnesota, and then down through Iowa and most of Missouri. The Delta Hills Pack had most of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama—but there was an area between the southern tip of Snake Bend and the northern border of Delta Hills that didn’t officially belong to either pack.
No-Man’s-Land.
There were strips of land throughout the continent that fell to the same classification, places where geographical barriers and state lines didn’t line up, or where history might