Trial by Fire

“Lake, should we perhaps lock Bryn in a closet?” Devon kept his tone light, but his eyes were deadly serious. “I’m thinking we should perhaps lock her in a closet.”

Lake tilted her head to one side, clearly considering the option. “You really think you can do this?” she asked me.

I didn’t bother tiptoeing around the truth. “I don’t know.”

Lake nodded, and for a second, she was the spitting image of her dad. “When you figure it out, I suspect you’ll let us know?”

That was Lake-ese for “deal me in or die a slow and painful death.” She wanted a promise that I wouldn’t run off behind their backs, that I wouldn’t do anything until I had a plan, and that once I had a plan, she and Dev would be the first to know.

“Bryn?” Dev parked the car, and his voice broke into my thoughts. The part of me that was alpha wanted to respond, to tell them both to back off, to take a lifetime of friendship and turn it into something else.

I ground my teeth and shook my head.

The three of us had always watched out for each other. Always. I wasn’t going to let what I was change that, change me. Our pack wasn’t like other packs. I wasn’t like other alphas.

That was it.

The idea came to me fully formed, like it had been in my head all along, and I just hadn’t unearthed it until now.

“Hey, Lake?”

She grinned. “Would I be right in thinking that you’ve got everything figured out?”

“Yup.”

“And you really think you can do this?”

“Yup.”

“By Jove,” Devon said, reading between the lines of my one-word answers, “I believe the lady has a plan.”

For the first time since Lucas had shown up at the Wayfarer, I really felt like I did.

This time, I was the last one to the clearing. The moon wasn’t full. The pack was sleeping, and those of us who weren’t hadn’t come here to run.

“Our pack isn’t like other packs.” My words appeared as wisps of white in the night air and echoed through the forest. The moon provided scant light, but even in the darkness, I could make out every detail of each of their faces.

Waiting.

Ready.

“We chose each other. When it counted, when the stakes were high, when no one else was there, you three had my back. You all gave up another life, another future, a hundred thousand things that might have been, and you did that for me, without even thinking, without questioning, without batting an eye.”

For a time, after I’d broken off my connection with Callum’s pack, but before we’d had our standoff with the Rabid, it had been just the four of us: Lake, Chase, Devon, and me. Later, there were others, and no matter where I went or what I did, the others’ names would always be etched into my soul, their well-being my first priority—but in the beginning, before we knew what it meant or what any of us were on the cusp of doing, there were four of us.

And there was no alpha.

“If something happens to me—tonight, tomorrow, five years from now, I know that you guys will take care of the others.” I met Dev’s eyes for a second and then closed mine. “You’d take care of each other.”

“Nothing is going to happen to you.” Devon was the one who said the words, but I felt the intensity with which he’d issued them emanating from all three. It should have been suffocating, but instead, it warmed me, held me, sent a charge racing along the surface of my skin.

The whites of Chase’s eyes caught the moonlight just so, and for a moment, I felt something animal and raw staring back at me.

I met his gaze head-on. I felt it down to the tips of my toes.

“Nothing is going to happen to me.” I repeated Devon’s words. “Because no matter what, the three of you would never let anything happen to me. It’s not supposed to work that way, because I’m the alpha, and that means that I’m supposed to be the one protecting you.”

My chest tightened, and the cold air cut into my lungs with each breath. I could sense their wolves, just below the surface. I could see the tension in their neck muscles and feel the adrenaline snaking its way from vein to vein.

“I’m not like other alphas.” The words slipped off my tongue almost as a confession, rather than a statement of pride, but I wasn’t here looking for absolution. I was here to make what I was—and what they were to me—work for us, instead of against us.

They wanted to protect me. They would always want to protect me, and admitting that I might need their help, that I might need to be protected, didn’t have to mean giving up the idea that I could keep the rest of the pack safe.

It just gave me another way to do it.

In the past six months, I’d learned that being alpha meant knowing everything about everyone. It meant that at any second on any day, I could tell you where every last member of my pack was, what they were doing, what they were feeling. I didn’t push them. I didn’t pry. But I was always there: in the things Chase would never tell another living person, in the way Maddy felt the first time she saw Lucas, in the quiet moments when Lake did nothing but run.

They could speak to me silently. I could make myself heard in their minds, but our pack-bond wasn’t exactly a two-way street. I was the alpha and they were my pack, and nature hadn’t designed werewolves to know their alpha the way he knew them.

She, I corrected myself silently. I wasn’t male. I wasn’t a werewolf, and there was nothing in the rule book to say that I couldn’t make it a two-way street.

I stepped forward, my head bowed—not in submission, but in something closer to prayer. I brought one hand to Lake’s cheek and another to Devon’s. I brushed the side of my face against Chase’s neck. I closed my eyes, and I let go.

For this moment, in this private midnight congress, I didn’t have to be alpha. I didn’t have to be the strong one. Chase had tried telling me that. So had Ali. For the first time, I could almost believe it—believe that I didn’t have to fight this battle alone.

I felt their breath on my skin. Heat leapt from their bodies to mine, and for all the perfect silence of the forest, the sounds inside my head rose.

I let out a ragged breath, pushing down the animal desire to howl. The scars on my hip bone felt like lines of liquid fire against my skin, but I didn’t fight it. I didn’t try to control the bond.

I let it control me.

I let them in.

I didn’t say anything to them. I let them see it for themselves: everything I thought, everything I felt. I let them sift through my mind, and with the part of me that was alpha screaming, I forced my body still, until the muscles in the back of my neck melted away, leaving my head lying on Chase’s shoulder, the way it had when he’d spent the night.

Devon nuzzled my right palm. Lake brought the tips of her fingers to touch my face. My mind and my body and every part of my being were so full of the three of them—what they were and what we were together—that there wasn’t room for anything else.

Anyone else.

Being alpha meant always being inside everyone else’s heads and never letting them inside yours, protecting the pack and never needing their protection—but it also meant that if the coven got inside my head, they’d have free access to everyone else’s.

Not anymore.

“When Chase spent the night, Archer couldn’t find me in my dreams.” I heard the words as I whispered them, felt the soft sound wrapping its way around each of their bodies. “If we’re lucky, having the three of you inside me will be enough to keep all of them out.”

And what if it’s not, Bryn? I recognized Lake’s voice in my mind, and for a split second, I saw an image of the two of us when we were eight or nine, suntanned and skinny-limbed and laughing.

I brought my hand to Lake’s and pressed my nails into the skin of her wrist, dragging them softly downward, leaving my mark.

You’re going to protect me, I told her, the way you always have, and if it doesn’t work, you’re going to protect the pack.

It wasn’t an order, but it wasn’t a question, either, because I knew them, and they knew me, and there wasn’t a single one of us who didn’t already know how this was going to end.