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.”
“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?