Callum ran a hand over the five o’clock shadow on his face, but the motion couldn’t quite hide his sheepish smile. “Old habits die hard, Bryn.”
I felt a few “old habits” of my own flaring up. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the carving he’d sent me on Thanksgiving Day, and I slammed it down into his palm.
“A Trojan horse?” I said. “Seriously, Callum? You saw what was going to happen, you knew, and all you could give me was a cryptic carving whose meaning wouldn’t register until after Shay had sent a ticking time bomb into my ranks?”
The poker face fell back into place. “I wanted to be there. I wanted to help you, but this was something you needed to do on your own.”
This tune was already old. “I’m Sorry for It, but I’d Do It Again” was quickly becoming Callum’s theme song.
“There are things you don’t know, Bryn, things I can’t tell you about the person you’re meant to become.”
I swallowed the urge to tell him that the next time he could take his cryptic warnings and put them where the sun don’t shine. Instead, I asked him the question I’d come here to ask, the one he’d almost certainly known he would be answering when he drove here to meet me.
“Will you do it?” I didn’t specify what it was. I didn’t have to.
A flicker of sadness passed over Callum’s face, and something tender flashed through his eyes, but a moment later, all of that was gone. Callum reached across the border and ran one hand over my head and down the length of my hair, the way he had a million times when I was growing up.
“Yes,” he said softly. “I will.”
“Now?” I asked, and he let out a bark of laughter that made me wonder exactly what memory from my youth my request had provoked. I’d never exactly been what one would call patient.
“No,” Callum replied sternly. “Not now. You have some time yet, Bryn-girl. Human time. I’d not have you giving that up.”
I didn’t like his answer, but there was no one else I could ask to do the unthinkable. Chase and Devon would have refused, Lake would have found a way to beat the tar out of me just for asking, and I didn’t trust anyone else to do it right. If the werewolf who attacked me pulled his punches, all I’d have to show for it would be a boatload of scars, and if he went too far, I’d be dead.
This wasn’t a science. There were no guarantees. But this was Callum, and if there was one person I trusted to know exactly how much he could hurt me for the greater good, it was him.
“You won’t tell Ali?” I asked. I’d thought this through, but given that I valued my life, I didn’t think cluing my foster mother in would be a good idea.
“She’d never forgive me for even considering it,” Callum replied.
I snorted. “She’s never going to forgive you anyway.”
“Brat.”
I accepted the word as a term of endearment but didn’t take that one extra step to cross from my territory into his, and as much as he might have wanted to, he didn’t cross over in my direction, either.
I had my pack, and he had his. I had my reasons for asking. Knowing Callum, he had his reasons for saying yes.
Maybe this moment had been inevitable from the day Callum had saved me and taken me in. Maybe he’d always known it would come down to this. Maybe he’d hoped that it wouldn’t.
In any case, if there was one thing the past month had taught me, it was that the stronger a pack was, the stronger their alpha—and the stronger the alpha, the stronger the pack.
I wanted my pack to be safe.
I wanted to be able to protect them.
I didn’t want a giant target forever drawn on my very human head. What had happened with Lucas wasn’t going to happen again.
Ever.
“Merry Christmas, Callum,” I said.
He smiled and handed me back the carving of the Trojan horse. “Merry Christmas, Bryn.”
I closed my fingers around the token. I walked back to Ali’s car, buried this entire conversation so deep in my mind that no one else would ever know it had taken place, and drove home.
Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.
Pack. Pack. Pack.
Soon.