“Ali’s going to be fine.” I addressed my words to Lance’s mammoth chest, unwilling to look him in the eye. “She’s strong. She’s never backed down from a fight.” Speaking hurt my throat, which tightened as I tried to breathe. “Not everyone dies,” I said more softly. “She’s going to be okay, right, Lance?”
“Right,” Lance said, suddenly discovering his voice. I glanced up at him, and his strong, Nordic features shuddered as he attempted something that resembled a smile the way that a great white shark resembles a goldfish.
That, more than anything, freaked me out. Ali was less than twelve feet away, behind closed doors with the pack’s doctor, an hour into a labor that was more likely to kill her than not. My entire body was shaking, and no matter what I said, the ghosts dancing in the corners of my mind whispered that everyone did die. Maybe not in labor, but when it came to me and mothers, dying was the status quo.
And now, Lance was actually speaking to me and smiling, something he hadn’t done in the entire course of my childhood, let alone the month he’d been part of my security team.
This could not possibly be a good sign. If he’d thought I was worrying over nothing, he wouldn’t have said a word.
“I’m going to throw up,” I said, turning again, this time to run for the bathroom. I slammed the door behind me and lunged for the toilet, but nothing happened. I was so scared, I couldn’t even throw up. I had to get out of here. I couldn’t just wait in our house, listening to Ali scream but barred from being in there with her. I couldn’t pace up and down the halls, stopping only when someone came to tell me that it was over, one way or another.
If Lance was talking to me, that meant that he was far enough off his game that he might not catch me in the act of leaving. Ali let out another bone-crunching cry of pain, and I closed my eyes, willing myself not to hear her screams. Forcing myself to pay attention only to the goal of escaping, I crept toward the window, letting the inhuman noises ripping their way out of Ali’s battered throat cover the sound of my steps. I lowered my body out the window and climbed down the side of the house. If I hadn’t been in such good shape, thanks to the daily workout regime I’d been put through every morning since I was six, I probably couldn’t have managed to make it to the ground without breaking both my legs, but between my training and my desperation to get away, it was a snap.
I hit the ground running and didn’t stop. As a matter of reflex, I covered my tracks, running in patterns designed to make tracking me difficult. There were several streams in the woods, as well as the disturbingly named Dead Man’s Creek, and I made a point of crossing all of them. Whenever I saw a second pair of tracks, I ran along them, and I loosed my emergency bag of cayenne pepper (which I kept on my person at all times) in an area where I knew any self-respecting tracker would take a great big whiff.
If that didn’t throw Lance off, nothing would. Everyone else would be too concerned with Ali to worry about me.
I’d been instinctively covering my tracks for several minutes before I realized where I was going and why. For the past few weeks, I’d been the poster girl for good behavior. I’d kept up my end of the bargain with fate, and now it was the universe’s turn to pay up. The way I saw it, I’d promised Ali I’d leave the pack’s secret alone until the baby was born and she was in the clear. Now, Ali was in labor, and I needed a distraction.
Close enough.
As part of my poster-child act, I hadn’t let myself actively think about the origin of the pack’s unrest, and I hadn’t formulated a master plan, but on a subconscious level, I think I’d always known where to go to find the answers. There weren’t foreign wolves on our land. A human hadn’t discovered our secret. There was a threat. An outside threat that couldn’t be dispelled with tooth and claw. Whatever the answer to this puzzle was, my best chance of finding it was about a mile away, deep in the heart of the woods, sitting directly on top of the highest point of elevation in the valley.
Callum’s house.
And for once, he wouldn’t be there, and he wouldn’t know that I had been until after I left. Then he’d kill me, but given the circumstances, I wasn’t entirely sure that I would care.
I knew the way there by heart, even though I rarely found myself on Callum’s doorstep. He preferred to come to me in my studio or at Ali’s house. Callum’s home was reserved for pack business. We all met there, twice a year: the wolves and their wives and Ali and me. It was a different sort of meeting than the pack’s ceremonial runnings, where the Weres shed their human skin and let their wolves come out to play. Those meetings I avoided like the plague, but the ones that took place at Callum’s house required my attendance. There was always an artifice of bureaucracy to them, like anyone in a room full of Weres could forget, even for a second, that our lives weren’t democratic in the least. My inclusion—and Ali’s, before she’d married Casey—marked me as unique in the werewolf world. Humans, unless claimed and Marked as a wolf’s mate, were never invited to Callum’s house. They were never initiated into the pack. They certainly weren’t adopted using a ceremony meant for pups whose mothers had died in childbirth.
They weren’t Marked by an alpha at the ripe old age of four.
Long story short, the way to Callum’s place, the inner sanctum of our werewolf community, wasn’t the kind of thing a girl just forgot, and I made it there in record time. Not being a complete idiot, I paused as I got close, standing absolutely still and listening for several minutes. My hearing was good for a human, my senses as developed as they could be given my species, and I put every ounce of that to use, trying to determine whether or not anyone was guarding Callum’s house. I doubted he would have anticipated my coming here, but if there were answers to be found inside, I might not be the only reason to guard them.
I closed my eyes. Concentrating on one sense at a time helped my accuracy. There was definitely someone inside, probably in the living room. And there, I thought, another one in the kitchen. There was no telling about the basement or the second floor. I opened my eyes, edged closer and closer until I was very near the house, and looked. And then, of course, I was promptly caught, because as quiet as I was, and as sneaky as I was, the people inside were werewolves, and any attempt at pitting my stealth against their stealth had roughly the same chance of success I would have enjoyed in challenging them to a wrestling match.
My first clue that things had gone awry was the person in the living room turning to look directly at me, her face tightening into a pointed glare. My second was the fact that the person I’d heard in the kitchen was now outside and stalking toward me, beefy fists clenched.
My third clue was a very, very audible growl.
“What are you doing here?” Marcus spat, grabbing me by the shoulder and turning me to face him in a way that hurt but wouldn’t leave a bruise. He’d learned the hard way not to leave any marks, and he’d never learn more than that. I was Callum’s, more connected to him than his most loyal soldiers, and for as long as I lived, Marcus would hate me for that. Any injury—physical or mental—that he thought he could get away with inflicting on me, he would.
It hadn’t taken very long on my end for the feeling to become mutual.
“I asked what you were doing here, girl.”
From Marcus, girl was an insult, and a large part of the reason that he hated me as much as he did. If the alpha had adopted anyone, chosen to teach anyone, that person should have been a werewolf, and he should have been male.
“C-C-C-Callum,” I said, forcing myself to stutter as a means of stalling for the time necessary to think up a truth that wouldn’t incriminate me.
“Callum?” Marcus said. “Is he hurt?”
As much as I hated Marcus, I couldn’t deny his loyalty. He would have died for Callum.
“Bryn, is Callum hurt?”
I could count on one hand the number of times Marcus had called me by any of my given names, let alone my preferred one. I remembered then how awful I’d looked in the bathroom mirror back at
home. Each of Ali’s screams had carved itself onto my face: my eyes were bloodshot, my lips torn from biting down, and the shadows under my eyes extended down past my cheekbones. Every muscle in my body was tuned to anguish. And Marcus, who hated Ali nearly as much as he hated me, probably couldn’t fathom the fact that I could be this worried about her. The only person Marcus cared enough to worry about was Callum, and he was taking my current state—and probably the fact that I was here and Callum and my team of guards hadn’t stopped me—as a sign that something was seriously wrong.
A better person would not have taken advantage of this fact. It was cruel, it was wrong, and it was stupid, but hey, it wasn’t like Marcus could possibly despise me more, and knowing that he’d be happy if Ali died rid me of any guilt I might have otherwise felt for playing him.
“It’s bad,” I said, letting the tears that I’d kept myself from shedding all day come. Marcus, smelling the truth in my words, didn’t notice that I hadn’t specified what was bad. “Might not make it.”
“Callum?” Marcus breathed. He gripped me with both arms, his fingers biting into my skin so hard that I could feel my flesh bruising. It occurred to me that I couldn’t make Callum’s condition sound too dire, because Callum was the only thing keeping me safe from Marcus, even now. “What’s wrong with you? Talk! Is Callum hurt?”
“Callum’s hurt,” I said, thinking of how much I was hurting and how Callum loved Ali the way I did. “He’s really hurt, Marcus.”
“Where?”
“Our house,” I said. And just like that, Marcus was gone, a blur of greasy hair and short, compact ferociousness tearing through the woods, convinced that he was on his way to save Callum.
I should have felt bad, but I didn’t. I felt nothing—not even a hint of trepidation that Callum wasn’t the only one who was going to kill me when what I’d been up to today became common knowledge.
One down, I mused silently, afraid that the wolf inside would hear me if I spoke out loud, one to go.
Since my cover had been truly blown already, I walked up to Callum’s front door and let myself into the house. I made it exactly three steps into the foyer before a voice stopped me.
“How is Callum hurt, Bryn?”
Of course the werewolf inside had heard my conversation with Marcus, and of course it was someone smart enough to ask the right questions.
“What do you mean how?” I returned.
Sora’s wide-set eyes narrowed, emphasizing the angles of her face. Clearly, she was not amused. “You know exactly what I mean, and you have three seconds to provide me with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth before you really, really regret it.”
As a threat, it was less than precise, but the step she took toward me as she issued those words sold it completely. Female werewolves were incredibly rare. Our pack had two, and most didn’t even have that, but somehow, over the past two hundred years, Sora had managed to rise above the males’ instincts to protect their females at all costs. In the years I’d been with the pack, she’d been one of Callum’s strongest, smartest, and most trusted soldiers.
She was also Devon’s mother, which meant that she knew me all too well.
“Two seconds.”
Well, shoot. “Callum isn’t physically hurt,” I said. “He’s hurting because Ali’s hurting. And if Marcus assumed otherwise, it’s totally not my—”
Sora cursed, her dainty lips twisting sideways into a full-on snarl. She grabbed my arm and none-too-gently dragged me to the kitchen, where she quickly and methodically bound my wrists and my ankles and then tied me to the handles on the refrigerator and freezer doors. If I hadn’t spent enough time at her house growing up to personally acquaint her with my affinity for picking locks, she probably would have just locked me in one of the spare bedrooms, but Sora had learned the hard way not to underestimate my resourcefulness.
I tested the resistance of her knots, and she snarled again, causing me to go very, very still.
“You are nearly too stupid to live, you foolish, reckless child.” She didn’t sound like Devon’s mother. She sounded like Callum’s right-hand man. “And you don’t even realize what you’ve done.”
“Marcus will be angry with me,” I said, trying to prove that I wasn’t completely ignorant of the inevitable consequences of my actions.
“He’ll be furious—and not just with you,” Sora said, checking her knots and making sure that I wasn’t going anywhere. “He’ll be angry with himself, and with you, and with Ali, because you’re her responsibility.”
Callum had Marked me, but as far as the pack was concerned, I was Ali’s daughter. If Marcus hadn’t hated Ali for her own sake, he would have hated her for mine.
“He’ll be furious with Ali, and he’ll be in her house. While she’s giving birth. She’s in enough danger as it is. She doesn’t need Marcus adding to it.”
My mouth went instantly dry. “Callum would … Callum would never let Marcus hurt her.”
“The odds are against her, Bryn. Do you really think having a homicidal werewolf in her house is going to help? He may not strike out at Ali directly, but his being there will hurt her, I promise you that.”
What had I done?
“I didn’t—” I cut off, swallowed, and tried again. “I swear I didn’t …”
I wasn’t sure how to fill in the blank. I didn’t know? I didn’t think? I didn’t mean to?
“I know,” Sora said, sounding more like the woman I knew. “I’ll go after him. I’m faster, but he has a head start. You’ll be here when I get back.” And then, like Marcus, she was gone, and I was alone, tied to a kitchen appliance in Callum’s house, dully agonizing over the fact that I’d just sent a raging werewolf Ali’s way. What if Marcus distracted the doctor? What if the stress was more than Ali’s broken body could take?
I’d promised to be good. I’d lied. I’d broken my end of the bargain, and Fate was angry. I didn’t want anybody else to die because of me.
Homicidal werewolf. Sora’s words rang in my ears, and my brain provided the accompanying visual.
Homicidal werewolf. Mommy. Blood-blood-blood-blood-blood.
Logically, I knew that I’d had nothing to do with my parents’ death—that it wasn’t my fault that I’d survived the attack and they hadn’t—but the thoughts in my head had stopped making sense, the words dissolving into nonsense, images crumbling into nothing. As time ticked on, I forced myself to stand ramrod straight, because I desperately wanted to slump and refused to allow myself even that small relief.
I don’t know how long I stood there. My muscles started aching, and words returned to me, and I just kept telling myself, over and over again, that if everything was okay, I’d never do something stupid again.
And then I heard the noise.
Screaming.
Words.
“Is somebody up there? Please! Please, help me. Can you hear me? Can anybody hear me?”
Somebody was in Callum’s basement, and that somebody needed help. I knew I shouldn’t respond, knew that anyone in Callum’s basement was there for a reason. The yelling degenerated from words into sounds, and that was what made up my mind, because the wordless howling struck a chord with me. Whoever was down there sounded like I felt. It didn’t matter who it was or what he’d done. I had to help him, because it wasn’t like I could do a thing for myself. Or for Ali.
I swung my bound ankles upward and twisted to angle my feet toward Callum’s kitchen drawers—and in particular, his knife drawer. I pressed my heel against the drawer knob and pulled. A well-placed kick sent the contents of the drawer flying, and I eyed the largest of the knives. Straining against the ties that held me in place, I managed to slide the knife closer. I caught the handle between my heels, and stretched my hands down to meet them.
Success.
As I began cutting through the restraints, the sound of inhuman screams echoing in my mind, I tried not to think about the fact that my vow to abstain from stupidity had lasted for all
of forty-five seconds.
CHAPTER FIVE
I HALF-EXPECTED SORA AND MARCUS TO RETURN before I managed to get myself untied, but either she hadn’t caught up to him in time and there was major damage control to do, or she’d successfully intercepted him on the way to Ali’s but had been forced to throw down in order to keep him from coming back here and tearing out my jugular. Either way, it didn’t look like the cavalry was going to be stopping me from my endless pursuit of stupidity anytime soon.
Rubbing my wrists, which had gone numb under the duct tape, I took a baby step away from the refrigerator and the remains of my common sense. Callum’s basement had always been off-limits to me, and I wasn’t dumb enough to believe the restriction was in place because that was where he hid my Christmas presents.
Whoever, or whatever, was in the basement was probably dangerous. And based on the fact that Sora had felt it necessary to tie me up before she left, there was a very good chance that the danger in question was the very thing that had Callum assigning wolves to shadow my every move.
I paused when I reached the door.
I shouldn’t be doing this.
I tested the doorknob, fully expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t.
I really shouldn’t be doing this.
I listened for a sound, anything to spur me onward or send me running, but heard nothing.
I have to do this.
Even if I ran as fast as I could, there was no way that I could get to Ali in time to offset any damage I might have done. My presence there would just make things worse for everyone, but twenty feet below me, there was someone in the basement. Someone who’d asked for my help.
Someone just like me.
I cracked open the door. Halfway through the job, I got tired of even pretending caution and threw it open the rest of the way. The basement was dimly lit, but my eyes adjusted quickly and I realized before the door even hit the wall and bounced back toward me what exactly it was that Callum kept in his basement.
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