Callum had spent my entire childhood teaching me that I wasn’t a Were, that my life was always in danger, that I would always, always be at a disadvantage, but now that he had his wolves jumping me at every turn, I felt safer and more protected than I ever had.
Clearly, I was insane.
Bizarrely, I was also happy. Ali, on the other hand, was not. She refused to look at me when I came back from training sessions. Until I’d bathed and bandaged myself, I was invisible—unless I tracked dirt onto her clean kitchen floors. She adamantly refused to ask me about the conditions Callum had laid upon me the night of the full moon, and I didn’t volunteer any of information.
Instead, the two of us got locked into a series of snappish fights about other things. She mandated that I spend more time at my studio, kept an irritatingly close watch on my grades as finals closed in, and outrageously threatened to ground me (again) if Devon and I didn’t spend at least one night a week kicking back and watching TV shows on DVD. The more I threw myself into my training, the more she forced my hand in day-to-day life. The two of us engaged in an epic screaming fight one Friday when she somehow got Callum to rearrange my sparring schedule so that she and I could drive to the city and shop after school.
She just wouldn’t let me be. Every step I took that brought me closer to the pack was countered with a move designed to pull me back. I never wanted this, Ali insisted on reminding me. There was more to life than fighting. I used to like doing other things. Did I want to miss out on life because Callum had decided to play God?
Personally, I wasn’t sure what her problem was. I was fine. I was happy. And pack or not, I was still me. Did she want me to pretend to be normal? Who was she kidding?
I’d never been a normal girl.
And then, one Saturday morning, I came down to breakfast, and it all came to a head when she flat-out told me that I wasn’t going to training.
Straw met camel’s back. Breaking commenced.
“You have no right to tell me—”
“You do not want to finish that sentence, missy. You want to sit down, close your mouth, and eat.”
“How am I supposed to eat with my mouth closed?”
“Bryn, that’s enough.”
Even Alex and Katie would have had the good sense to respond to the vein throbbing in Ali’s forehead, but sense was not a quality with which I had been overly endowed, and I was sick of her telling me what I could and could not do. Sick of her trying to make me something I didn’t want to be anymore.
“I’m going to training.”
She raised a single eyebrow, and my heart stopped beating. Throbbing forehead veins, raised eyebrows … I was treading on dangerous territory here. Physically, Ali wasn’t anywhere near the caliber of opponent I’d gotten used to facing off against on a regular basis. But she was Ali.
So I tried to be reasonable. “I have to go, Ali. I don’t have a choice.”
And neither, I hoped my words communicated, do you.
“There’s always a choice, Bryn—even if you’ve already made it. And if you want to unmake it, if there’s ever a moment when you’re not sure that you want this anymore, or when it gets to be too much …”
“There’s not.”
She put her face right next to mine. “But if there is, you tell me. You tell me, and I will fix this.”
Pack business didn’t work that way, but it would have taken a braver soul than I to tell Ali that.
“I don’t want to take it back. And I really do have to—”
She didn’t let me finish. “You have to eat, you have to make your bed, and you have to run a brush through that hair of yours before you leave this house, but at the moment, that’s all you have to do.”
“That’s not the way permissions work, Ali.”
Her eyes narrowed, and my pack-sense backed my common sense in telling me to roll belly-up and let her have her way on this one.
“You’re not the first person in the world to deal with the pack, Bryn. I know how permissions work.”
The things she didn’t say hung in the air between us: what she’d asked for, what she’d been forced to give. Whether she’d bargained on her own behalf, or—more likely—if she’d sacrificed bits and pieces of her autonomy over time to buy me mine. The questions were on the tip of my tongue, but Ali preempted my words by slapping some eggs on the plate in front of me.
“I know what you have to do to survive here, Bryn. I’ve been doing it for both of us for a very long time, but for the record, when I said that you didn’t have to go to training today, I wasn’t trying to start a fight with you.” She sat down in the chair next to me and stared at my eggs, refusing to meet my eyes. Her voice went very soft. “Callum called. He’s joining us right after breakfast, and then the two of you are going back to his place.”
“Just the two of us?” I asked, trying not to tip my hand and let her see the flicker of hope building inside me.
“Casey will be going as well,” Ali said. “Sora and Lance might be there, too.”
Three wolves.
Three babysitters.
Three bodyguards.
“I’m going to see him?”
The tone in my voice left no question as to who the “him” in question was.
“Yes, baby. You are.”
Ali hadn’t called me baby in so long. All of a sudden, I felt like the world’s most ungrateful brat for fighting with her.
“I’m going to see him.”
The words weren’t the apology I’d been aiming for, but Ali seemed to understand. “Yeah.”
It felt like I’d be working toward this for so long that somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten that there was an end goal. Now that it was here and real, I couldn’t believe it. Not at all.
“You’re going to see him. You’ll ask him what you need to ask him. You’ll do what you need to do. And then, this will all be over. No more permissions. No more conditions. Just us.”
No more fights.
No more bond.
No more running with the pack when the moon was full.
I’d be me again. The me Ali wanted me to be. I thought of the ball I’d visualized before I’d let down my shields that night at the Crescent and given myself over to the pack-mentality. The things I’d wanted and been before.
Were they still there, safe where I’d left them? Could I go back? Did I want to?
“Go on,” Ali told me. “Get dressed. Make your bed. And for heaven’s sakes, Bryn, brush your hair. You’re starting to look like a cavegirl.”
“Bryn want kill dinosaur,” I said, pantomiming what I thought passed for a decent dinosaur-killing motion.
For the first time in weeks, Ali laughed. “Go on. And if you’re very good, Ali show Bryn big heaping secret. Fiiiiiirrrre. Make tasty warm dinosaur meat.”
I snorted. “Dork.”
“Right back at ya, kiddo.”
The exchange felt so normal. So human. So far from whatever it was that I was becoming, day by day. Now that I was going to see Chase, an insane part of me wanted him to see this Bryn—the one who laughed with Ali, not the one who Callum had molded into a paragon of self-defense.
“I’m going to see him,” I said, testing out the sound of the words, wondering which me Chase would meet. “Today.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“CASEY, IF THERE’S A HAIR ON HER HEAD OUT OF place when you get back, you’re sleeping on the couch for the rest of your life.” Ali kissed her husband as she said those words, but he didn’t take her any less seriously for it. She moved to turn her threats on Callum, but he shook his head at her.
“Have I ever returned her to you in worse shape than I took her?” he asked.
Ali opened her mouth to answer, and my sarcasm barometer sensed an oncoming change in pressure, but Callum just gave Ali the eyebrow arch that she’d given me.
“Alison.”
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who got the full-first-name treatment. “You’ve never brought her back irreparably harmed,” Ali admitted grudgingly. “This better not be a first.”
The other Weres in the room, including Casey, narrowed their eyes at her, their backs stiffening. My pack-sense told me that they didn’t like the challenge to our alpha’s authority. It was unnatural. Ungodly. Impertinent. When Ali married Casey, she should have adopted his status in the pack, but she’d lived among them for too long without a place in the hierarchy to settle into one now, and her challenge rankled. At the very least, Casey should have known what he was getting into with Ali; she’d never made even the least effort to hide her lack of respect for pack tradition.