“Stop!” I yelled, issuing the word at top volume with both my mouth and my mind. The bond that connected me to Chase, Devon, and Lake crackled, and all three of them paused. Thrown—and affected by the charge of something in the air—their attackers paused, for just a second.
And then their directive was back.
Obey.
“No,” I screamed. “You don’t obey him. You obey me, and I said to stop.”
I reached for Wilson, for his bond with the others, and I pulled it toward me—pulled their hopes and fears and the people they’d been before he’d stolen that from them toward me—and it sent them as perfectly still as my friends.
“What are you doing?” Wilson growled, gripping me from behind. Slowly, the wolves—his wolves—turned from my friends to face him. A growl broke from Madison’s throat, followed directly by a whine.
She was confused. Who was the alpha here—Wilson or me?
“You think you can steal them? Make them yours?” Wilson asked, his gaze losing its focus, making him look unhinged.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to make them mine. I want to make them theirs.”
You have a choice. The words flowed out of me, and into the wolves I was commanding—Devon, Lake, Chase, and all of the others. You can choose to obey, to submit, to let someone else make your decisions, or you can decide. You can decide who you want to be, who you want to be tied to. Who you trust.
I showed them, with my mind, what I’d done to interfere with their bond to Wilson, and what Chase and I had done, when we’d chosen each other and my friends over Callum’s pack.
Madison was the first one to melt back into human form. Naked and lying on the ground, she lifted her head, unaware of her own nudity. Broken, but regal.
“Madison, no,” Wilson said sharply, like a man talking to a dog.
“Funny thing about resilience,” I said, my heart breaking for her and for all of them. “Being resilient doesn’t just give you the ability to survive. It doesn’t just make you a fighter. It makes you resistant. To injury. To death.” I met Madison’s eyes, looking only at them and not at the rest of her body. “To dominance.”
Being what we were meant that Chase and I—and all of Wilson’s victims—played by different rules. That was the reason that at the ripe old age of four, I’d been able to shut Callum’s pack out of my head. It was the reason that Chase and I had been able to choose each other over all else.
It was the reason Chase had been able to break his bond to Wilson for good.
“If you don’t want to obey him, you don’t have to. You don’t have to obey me, either. But you can connect to me, or to the others, or to anyone you want. You can choose your family. You can choose freedom. You can choose this—”
I showed them what it was like to be part of a pack like the one my friends and I had created. All of us together, our bodies folding into one, our minds connected.
Madison pushed herself to her feet and walked toward us—dirty, bleeding, and bare. “I was six. On a vacation with my family, and he took me. He took me and he hurt me and he Changed me.” She looked at Wilson. “You told me that I was yours. You told me how to dress and how to act. You changed my last name. You took away everything, and I. Want. It. Back.”
She threw her head backward, and I could actually see the power coming off her body, could see tiny bits of light and power that connected the Changed Weres by their souls. And I could see the girl Madison had been, before he’d taken her, rewiring her connections, writing her own destiny.
One by one by one, the others stood.
I felt them, reaching out to one another and to me, and in that moment, I made a decision of my own.
We were the same.
All of us.
The same.
And for whatever reason, I’d been the lucky one. I’d escaped, and they hadn’t. But for the rest of my life, for as long as I lived—whether it was seconds or years—I would be there for them. I would make it up to them. I would help them make it up to themselves.
Mine.
Mine.
Mine.
The whisper came from all corners of the yard as we claimed one another. From Madison and her pack-mates, from Chase and mine, and then, like the birth of a star, there was an incredible surge of light and heat that threw all of us to the ground.
Prancer was the only one left standing.
And as the rest of us got our bearings, only one directive remained in the air and in our bodies.
Kill the Rabid.
I stood and walked away from my nightmares until I reached Chase. I pressed myself into his side, and he buried his head in my hair. He was mine, and I was his. We were the same, and we were more.
I averted my eyes, turning my body into his, and I breathed in his scent, which smelled to me like safety and home. All around us, the others were Shifting into wolf form, and I could feel the power rising in the air. Not just the power of the Shift, not just the power of a pack on the run, but something older.
Deeper.
Primal.
Fight.
For years, Madison and the others had forgotten that they could. Wilson’s domination had held their instincts at bay, but now …
Fight.
Fight.
Fight.
An eerie silence descended on the lawn, only to be broken a moment later by a horrible wail, an inhuman sound drowned out by howls and snapping teeth and the sound of flesh tearing like Velcro.
They leapt at him from all sides. Knocked him to the ground. Mobbed his body, a sea of fur and claw and red-red-red.
I felt the fury. Felt it like a siren’s call, but I breathed through it, holding tight to Chase, the smell of blood so thick in the air that the other smell—burnt hair and men’s cologne—disappeared into coppery, wet, warm …
Nothing.
It was over.
The feeding frenzy stopped, the haze receding as quick as it had come, and when I lifted my head off Chase’s chest to look at the carnage, there wasn’t enough left of Wilson the Rabid to bury, let alone heal.
The cries of the pack—our pack—echoed in my head and out of it, as human words and as one united, animalistic howl.
Chase and I let it roll over us, washing away everything we’d been before this moment. Our bodies intertwined.
He was mine.
I was his.
But we weren’t alone. Not by a long shot. I melted into Chase’s mind, and he came into mine, and as Chase-Wolf-Bryn, for a split second, we saw the world around us with omniscient eyes. Saw our connections to the others—to Lake and Devon and each of the children Wilson had turned. Saw the power we held, saw it well up as the others changed back to human form and turned toward us.
Pack.
Pack.
Pack.
The exhilaration of being Chase-Wolf-Bryn faded in comparison to the overwhelming sensation of being Us. All of Us. The urge to run, to be free, to be together, was overwhelming, and for the second time in my life, I felt that kind of adrenaline turn toward focusing on a single person. A leader.
They wanted to run. But they couldn’t. Not yet. All around me, the whisper of the pack took on a single word. Alpha, alpha, alpha.
And that was when we realized—Chase and his wolf and I—that all of the other wolves seemed to be staring directly at me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ME? HOW COULD THEY POSSIBLY BE LOOKING AT ME and thinking a word that conveyed that kind of power? Absolute, unerring, eternal. Protection. Punishment. Justice.
A pack alpha was many things, but human definitely wasn’t one of them. And yet, there the others were, staring at me with a kind of palpable expectation, their bodies humming with the energy of the kill. They wanted to run, and they wanted me to tell them they could.
Yours, Chase told me silently, and then, he rested his head on top of mine. His breath was hot on my scalp, and I shivered.
Mine. That assertion came from the wolf inside Chase—battered and bruised from the fight and angry that he hadn’t been allowed to take down his prey: the man who had dared to touch The Girl. Chase’s wolf wasn’t making a claim over any of the other Resilients, he wasn’t answering their silent plea to run. He was stating what was, to him, quite obvious.
I was his.
I wanted to burrow inside of Chase, to hide in his mind, to take refuge in his wolf’s possessiveness and look away from the dozens of eyes—human and wolf—boring into my own, but I couldn’t.