And when they did, we’d be ready. I’d be ready.
For the first time in my life, Callum looked away from my gaze before I looked away from his, a slight, knowing smile playing at the corners of his lips. Then, without a word, he turned and followed the other alphas out the door, until the only ones left in the cabin were the ones whose minds and heartbeats I knew as well as my own. The ones whose strength and power pulled at me from all directions, with the familiar call of alpha, alpha, alpha.
Pack, pack, pack, I whispered back, my mind to theirs. Let’s run.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“HEY, COULD I GET A REFILL ON THIS COFFEE?”
“That depends,” Lake said, looking at the customer with dancing eyes before turning to shout toward the bar. “Maddy, you want me to shoot him?”
Maddy—who’d joined Lake as a waitress and proven that the only thing more terrifying than one of them was two—pretended to think it over for a moment and then shook her head. “If you shoot him, it’ll take him longer to run far, far away. And besides, it might hurt your tip.”
Lake turned back to the man in question—one of many Weres who’d ventured into the Wayfarer in the two months since it had become the center of a new territory. Montana and western North Dakota no longer belonged to the Stone River Pack. The Wayfarer and the land surrounding it for a good hundred miles on either side belonged to the newly minted Cedar Ridge Pack, courtesy of Callum.
Technically speaking, the new territory belonged to me.
There was a part of me—the human part—that still believed it was all semantics, that I was an alpha in name only, because Weres couldn’t understand the idea of a pack without one. But there was another part—the part of me that knew every second of every day where each and every one of my wolves was—that recognized that the title wasn’t a meaningless one. It wasn’t empty.
It was real.
But it was different, too, from the way things had been in Callum’s pack. The wolves in Cedar Ridge and I were all connected, but until or unless we were threatened, I didn’t control that connection, and I didn’t use it to control anyone else. I hadn’t spent my entire life referring to Callum as a patriarch only to turn into his female counterpart overnight. If there was a problem, I solved it. If they needed me, I was there, but in their human lives, the wolves in my pack could choose when to follow me and when not to, and most of the time, I didn’t make an active attempt at leading. It wasn’t like Lake was ever going to let me live under the delusion that I ran things. She bossed me around as much as she always had, and that wasn’t even taking her dad or Keely or Ali into account.
None of the adults in our lives had been particularly pleased with our adventure to Alpine Creek. Our parents had arrived at the cabin just after the battle of wills with the Senate had ended—and needless to say, Lake and I hadn’t fared quite as well against Ali and Mitch as we had against the entire werewolf establishment. I’d spent most of the summer grounded, and with the new school year fast approaching, Ali and Mitch had only backed off because, laissez-faire alpha or not, my mood tended to trickle down into the others, and a pack of stir-crazy juvenile wolves was nobody’s friend.
“Want another root beer?” Keely asked me.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
The man who’d futilely asked for more coffee turned to glare at me, but all I did was raise an eyebrow, and he looked very quickly away.
There were seventeen werewolves permanently in residence at the Wayfarer now—Lake, Mitch, Katie, Alex, Devon, and twelve of the kids we’d rescued from Alpine Creek. Some of the others—mostly teens—had chosen to make their way elsewhere. I hadn’t objected. The two who’d been attacked most recently had gone home, with the understanding that the local pack would treat them like visiting dignitaries and not try to claim them or enforce any dominance of their own. For now. Two or three others, all eighteen years old (or close enough to it to convince Ali they didn’t need constant supervision), were playing at being peripheral, though my pack-sense—alpha-sense—told me that none of them would stay gone for long.
You’re quiet today.
The sound of Chase’s voice in my head made my lips curve slowly upward. There were moments when my pack-sense was still, and for seconds, maybe minutes at a time, I could remember what it had been like when the two of us were the only people in my head.
The only people in the world.
I knew without asking that he was nearby. That if I snuck out my window late at night and tiptoed into the forest, I’d see him. I’d bring him clothes, and he’d shed his wolf skin, and under the blanket of darkness, he’d tell me everything he’d seen since he’d been gone.
Chase was my eyes and ears. Lake and Devon were my guard, the way Devon’s parents were Callum’s, but Chase was my emissary, the one who ran the perimeter of our territory and reported back.
The job suited him, and it suited Ali that he wasn’t always here, that some days, there was space between us and she could pretend that since he hadn’t Marked me and I hadn’t Marked him, we were just two crazy kids with a crush.
You’re always quiet, I replied to Chase’s comment by turning it around on him. I miss you.
I felt the reply from his wolf, the kind that told me that sometimes, they thought they’d spent their whole lives missing me.
Dork.
Cynic, Chase retorted.
I wished that I could leave my root beer on the counter and run out to meet him, but being alpha meant that I didn’t always get to do as I pleased. Sometimes, I had to do things just because they needed to be done, even if they terrified me.
Even if they made me feel like there was a possibility that the entire world might fall out from underneath me.
That was what I was doing in the restaurant today—besides watching Maddy and Lake torturing the clientele. The alpha of the Stone River Pack had requested a meeting with me.
I’d agreed.
Callum and I hadn’t seen each other since he’d walked out of that cabin in the woods. He hadn’t called me. He hadn’t written. He hadn’t made a single move to even talk to me until now.
Pack. Pack. Pack.
I took some relief in their presence, and I opened up my senses, reminding myself that I was doing this for them. That Callum was an ally, not my keeper. That I was an alpha, not his girl.
Sipping on my root beer, I swung my feet back and forth and found amusement in the way that Lake zeroed in on a target—human, most likely—to hustle at pool. A low hum in my pack-bond brought my eyes to look for Maddy, who had fallen into a quiet spell, the kind she still had every hour or two, and I reached out to her with my mind, reminding her that I was here. That we all were. And that she was herself.