I pictured their power, and I pulled.
The rush was like nothing I’d ever felt before, and with it came the rest of their instincts—the bloodlust and the adrenaline and the need to force this challenger down.
My body alive with that power, I turned my attention back to Lucas and said a single word: “Down.”
Lucas fell to the ground. His mouth snapped shut. His eyes opened wide with fear. Even with the power of the pack—and their animal instincts—flowing through me, like charge through a wire, I wanted to let him live.
I wanted to give him another chance.
I wanted to, but I couldn’t.
Over, I told him, my mind-voice echoing with power that wasn’t mine. Lucas rolled onto his side. I knelt next to him, fear nothing more than a memory, a distant memory, like maybe every time I’d ever felt it was nothing more than a dream.
Challenge. Challenge. Challenge.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
I held Lucas there in wolf form. I looked into his eyes. I ran one hand gently over the fur on his neck, and then, with the power of an entire pack behind me, their Resilience bleeding into mine, I told him to go to sleep.
Forever.
CHAPTER THIRTY
EVERY MORNING, I WOKE UP AND I SAW THE PERSON who’d killed Lucas staring back at me in the mirror. Every night, I went to bed wondering if there was ever a point where I could have stopped him from drawing that line in the sand. Like clockwork, I stared up at my ceiling, analyzing all the moments, big and small, that had led to his challenge. I searched for an answer that wouldn’t have led to my looking into his eyes and watching him die.
I knew Lucas wouldn’t have survived long without the protection of a pack. If I hadn’t been so trusting, if I’d turned him away, the outcome would have been the same—at least for him.
I blamed myself for not being able to get through to him. I blamed Shay for setting me up. But mostly, I blamed the fact that when Lucas had challenged me, he’d had reason to believe that he would win.
If I’d been stronger, if I’d been faster, if I’d been the type of opponent that other people feared, Lucas would still be alive. He’d challenged me because I was human. I’d won because I wasn’t—not really, not anymore.
Chase slid into bed beside me, the way he had every night since the fight. We didn’t talk about it. He didn’t yell at me, the way Devon had beforehand, or say that he’d recognized the darkness in Lucas, the desperation, even though he had. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t push. He just held me, and I breathed in his scent.
Every night, he was there.
And even though I was lonely, I wasn’t alone.
A week before Christmas, Maddy came to me. It had been eleven days since Lucas’s challenge.
“I’m leaving.” She said the words calmly, but I knew what they had cost her. The Wayfarer was Maddy’s home. We were her family.
She was already gone.
“I don’t blame you,” Maddy said. I stared at her, and she amended her statement. “I don’t want to, but every time I see you, I see him. Every time I hear you, I hear him, and I know it was his fault. I know that he’s the one who did this to you and to me, and I want to hate him for it, but I don’t. I can’t, and I can’t be here. I can’t stay here.”
“Maddy, it’s okay.” I’d known she was going to leave— probably before she did.
“No,” Maddy replied. “It’s not. I’m not. But someday, I will be.”
I recognized that as both a promise and a statement of fact. Whatever it took, whatever she had to do, Maddy was going to survive this. I just wished she didn’t have to do it alone.
I wished that I hadn’t been the one to kill the boy she loved.
“There’s a stretch of land along the Colorado border,” I said. “Sage’s family lives there. They know. You’d be safe there, and you wouldn’t have to see me—”
“You’re there, Bryn. You’re everywhere, every day, all the time.” Maddy met my eyes, but it wasn’t a challenge. It was a request, one that told me she was beyond dominance, beyond submission, beyond everything other than the need to get away. “You have to let me go.”
It took me a moment to realize what she was asking.
“You want me to let you go,” I repeated. “As in go go?”
“You’re a part of me, and if I’m going to get through this, I need you not to be.”
I saw in her eyes that she’d thought this through, that while I’d been lying in my bed, looking up at my ceiling, she’d been doing the same in hers.
“If you’re not Cedar Ridge, we can’t protect you. Any alpha who sees you could take you by force and make you theirs.”
Lone werewolves were dangerous. A lone female was more or less unheard of. The other alphas would hunt her to the ends of the earth if they knew.
“No one is going to see me,” Maddy said with that same quiet dignity she’d always had. “I’ll stick to No-Man’s-Land. I’ll lie low.”
I couldn’t let her do this.
“If you force me to stay, I’ll hate you. Maybe not right away, but sooner or later, I won’t be able to help it anymore, and I’m not going to do that to either of us, Bryn. I’m going to go away, and I am going to get better, because if I don’t, the next time someone challenges you, it’s going to be me.” She paused, her chest heaving with the effort of saying the words. “I don’t want to be that person. Please.”
She didn’t give me the chance to respond.
“Being Resilient means having the ability to shake off pack-bonds. I did it with the Rabid. If you force me to, I’ll do it with you. But I’d rather you just …”
She closed her eyes, lowered her head, and finished the statement in a whisper, from her mind to mine. Let me go.
I nodded then, because I couldn’t speak. I closed my eyes. I reached out and touched her face gently.
I dragged my nails over the flesh of her neck, lightly leaving my mark.
And then I let her go.
The world realigned in an instant, and I did my best to tune out my senses, the ones that recognized what Maddy was now—and what she wasn’t anymore.
“Anytime you want to come back, you can. No conditions, no questions asked.” I sounded calmer than I felt, and that somehow tricked my brain into thinking I could handle this. “If you get into trouble and can’t or don’t want to come here, go to Colorado.”
I might not have been sure of much when it came to Callum, but I was sure that he wouldn’t use Maddy the way the other alphas might. She’d be a person and not just a power play to him.
“Bye, Bryn.”
Just like that, Maddy was gone.
For the first time since Lucas’s challenge, I let myself cry.
I woke up on December 24, looked in the mirror, and made a decision. I didn’t tell anyone, because I knew they would argue with me. I brushed my lips against Chase’s, and his curved upward in response.
I willed him to keep sleeping.
I walked toward the door and paused at the dresser, just long enough to look at myself in the mirror one last time and pick a small wooden carving up off the base. I tucked it into the pocket of my jeans, helped myself to the keys to Ali’s car, and drove.
It took hours to reach my destination. I threw the car into park and slipped out of the driver’s seat. Then I walked right up to the edge of the sign—WELCOME TO COLORADO—and I waited.
I didn’t have to wait long. Callum seemed smaller than I remembered, and he looked younger, right up until we were standing less than two feet apart, and then my eyes adjusted and saw him as they always had.
For a few seconds, we just looked at each other, poker faces firmly in place, Callum on his side of the border and me on mine.
“I don’t suppose Ali knows you took off with her car,” he said finally. I would have taken his speaking first as a sign of victory, but I recognized a hint of mischief around the corners of his eyes.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m pretty sure she does, because I’m betting you called and told her.”
Callum ran a hand over the five o’clock shadow on his face, but the motion couldn’t quite hide his sheepish smile. “Old habits die hard, Bryn.”