Powerful.
And unlike Shay, he had something to fight for—someone. As Dev’s wolf body collided with his brother’s, as the two of them fell to the ground and Devon grappled for position, as his jaws closed around Shay’s neck, the only thing in his mind was me.
Looking eerily like his mother in posture and motion, Devon went for Shay’s throat.
Teeth bit through inhuman skin—deeper and deeper. Shay fought, his claws digging into Devon’s stomach, but Dev never let go.
He bit until he hit bone.
He bit through bone.
He didn’t stop—not when Shay’s arms dropped to his side, not when he stopped moving, stopped fighting.
My best friend tore his brother to pieces, and I watched.
Devon, who couldn’t stand to have dirt under his fingernails, bathed in his brother’s blood. By the time he stopped—stopped fighting, stopped the bloodlust, just stopped—there was nothing left of Shay: nothing scary, nothing evil, nothing dark.
He was nothing.
Dev Shifted back to human form. Naked as the day he was born, he spat on the ground and—God bless him—asked, ever so politely, if any of us had a mint.
I choked—on hysterical giggles. On tears.
Devon was alive.
The man who’d killed Chase—Chase, Chase, my Chase—was dead.
And finally, finally we were free.
All around us, the Snake Bend Pack howled—a horrible, keening sound, a soul-wrenching send-off for a man who’d brought them nothing but pain.
Challenge. Challenge. Challenge.
The call was fading; the moment had passed, but something else was rising in its place: something that brought the wolves’ howls to a close.
Something that brought them to their bellies, to their knees.
I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t feel it. But I knew what it was.
Devon had killed the Snake Bend alpha. Shay’s second-in-command was already dead, and the most dominant werewolf present was Dev.
Dev, who wasn’t a member of the Snake Bend Pack.
Dev, who was a member of mine.
I looked at the Weres—a mixture of men and wolves—on the ground. I saw them gazing up at Devon, and I knew. Leaving them to fight it out for dominance would be asking for trouble.
They needed someone to take Shay’s place—and Devon was the one who’d delivered the killing blow.
Shay’s dead. They’re fair game. You could claim them, Devon told me silently, but the wolf inside of him said something very different. It longed for something else: something animal and powerful and right.
I nodded—not in response to Devon’s request, but in response to the knowledge that this was what Callum had foreseen, this was what was meant to be.
I walked forward on stiff human limbs. I stood next to Devon, so close that I could feel the heat of his body, smell Shay’s blood. I lifted my hand to his cheek. I smiled—and then before he could tell me not to, I swiped my fingernails across the surface of his neck.
I let him go.
I pulled myself out of his head, snapped his bond to our pack like it was dried spaghetti.
I heard it break.
I felt it, felt his absence, like a hole in my own body.
“Bronwyn,” he said, but I shook my head, didn’t let him finish.
“Go,” I said. “They’re waiting. For you.”
All around us, the Snake Bend Pack watched in silence, their eyes on him.
“All I ever wanted,” Devon said softly, “was to stay with you.”
I didn’t reply, because Devon, of all people, understood—what we wanted didn’t matter. My first allegiance was to my pack—and from this point forward, his would be to Snake Bend.
“You stubborn, impossible, backhanded little wench.”
From Dev, that was the equivalent of good-bye.
He turned. He walked toward the Snake Bend wolves. And then he claimed them. I could see the power, shining in his eyes, could see the moment they accepted him, the instant their world realigned itself with Devon at their center.
Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.
I couldn’t hear his thoughts or theirs, but I could see the call spreading from wolf to wolf. I could see them waiting for their alpha’s signal.
With one last glance over his shoulder at me, Devon gave into the call of the wild. He Shifted—and as a pack, one incredible, immovable, unfathomable force, they ran.
EPILOGUE
“BUT WHY?”
I tried to summon the part of my brain responsible for political dealings. It was all about patience—and control.
“Because,” I replied calmly, “Rose is too little to play Fuzzy Wuzzy Death Ball. She’s just a baby.”
Lily did not seem overly impressed with my reasoning. Katie and Alex had been following her around since they were barely a year old themselves. Lily wasn’t disposed to wait for Maddy’s baby to outgrow infant status.
Despite the similarity in their names, the four-year-old hurricane and Maddy’s little daughter were about as different as two pups could get. Rose was quiet, even when she cried—and she rarely cried. She was wide-eyed, observant, peaceful—and sometimes, I would have sworn she was looking at things no one else could see.
We still didn’t know—what her knack was, why the Shadows were drawn to her, how she’d brought them back. But you could tell, just by looking at her, just by holding her, warm and solid in your arms, that she was different.
Impossible.
A miracle.
A female born alone.
None of which made her capable of playing the rough-and-tumble game Lily had fashioned for herself and the twins.
“Get some of the older kids to play,” I told Lily.
She made a face. “They cheat.”
Since I was highly skeptical that Fuzzy Wuzzy Death Ball actually had rules, that seemed doubtful. More likely, Lily just didn’t like playing with anyone she couldn’t boss around.
“Go,” I told her, cutting off another “why” with a gentle nudge to her side. “Go on.”
After a long, considered moment, Lily went, leaving me in the woods alone.
No Devon.
No Chase.
Just me.
That wasn’t technically true, of course. Lake was still around, ready to kick my butt out of moping anytime she suspected the dark place might be beckoning me on. Griffin assisted her in that effort, though I suspected he ran interference on my behalf just as often.
Then there were the newest members of our pack. Maddy—and baby Rose—and a handful of adult males, handpicked by Devon for their fighting prowess and their loyalty. Before I accepted them as part of Cedar Ridge, I’d run their names by Mitch. Having interacted with them more than once over the years, he’d given the transfers his stamp of approval, and Callum had sent me e-mails, encouraging me to accept Devon’s offer of extra muscle.
I hadn’t replied.
There were twenty-five of us now—enough to cover a wider territory than we’d held before. With a civility unobserved in any alphas before us, Devon and I had split the former Snake Bend territory the way we’d split candy bars when we were little. North Dakota was mine; the lower states his.
Together, we had more people, more land, and more females than most other packs could ever even dream of. I didn’t kid myself that the other alphas were unaware that the Cedar Ridge and Snake Bend packs, though separate, would fight any enemies as one.
I also didn’t ignore the obvious, that this was the future Callum had been aiming for all along. This was the reason he hadn’t warned me that Shay might come after Maddy. This was why he hadn’t prevented Chase’s death, why I woke up each day alone, feeling like half my body was missing and a chunk of my soul had gone dead inside.
Callum had his reasons. I understood—I did. I saw his thought process with crystalline clarity; I recognized that the outcome—Shay dead, Devon the alpha of his own pack, the other alphas sufficiently warned about what might happen if someone came after me—was the best any of us might have hoped for.
But Chase was still dead, and that, I couldn’t forgive. Not now. Not ever.
You can’t trade a human’s life for a wolf’s.
If Callum had Changed me when I asked him to, Shay would have had to go through me to get to Chase. I would have had the option of offering my life up for the wolf Caroline had killed. With my life on the table, Shay wouldn’t have been able to go after anyone else.