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.
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.