Raised by Wolves(103)

Chase hadn’t escaped the Rabid. The Rabid had sent him to me.

No. I wouldn’t let him taint what Chase and I had. I’d die first.

“I guess this explains how you find them,” I said, keeping my voice low and dull. “Your victims.”

“I find them the same way you would,” he said. “The same way you will, once you’re mine. Like to like. I’ve been waiting a long time for someone strong enough to help me, someone as special as I am.” He leaned forward and touched my hair. “You’re glorious as a human. So brave. So strong. I should thank Callum for that, I really should. As a Were, you’ll be a princess.” He sighed. “My princess.”



I shuddered and my throat burned, acid working its way from my stomach to my mouth. I fought the nausea as best I could. In my head, the others roared, and the connection between us pulsed, bright like lightning in my mind.

They’d escaped from the sheriff with only a bullet graze to Devon’s side that had already started to heal.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, they told me. We’re coming.

No, I replied. You don’t understand.

I begged them to come completely into me, to take my thoughts and knowledge as their own and to know what they were up against.

Not just a pack of werewolves. A pack of Resilient werewolves—capital R—who’d lose their minds the moment danger closed in. Of my other selves, only Chase had the same advantage. Devon was a purebred and Lake was a fighter, but their instincts to fight, to escape, to win weren’t any stronger than the average werewolf’s.

“They’re coming,” Wilson said out loud. “Your friends. I can feel them. I can smell them. They smell like anger. Like blood.”

“So do you.” I met his eyes, and I smiled. “You may be scrappy,” I said, intentionally using the word to demean everything he’d just told me, “but you’re still allergic to silver, aren’t you? You took a couple of bullets. I took a chunk out of your side. You have to be hurting right now.”

He slammed his arms into me, pushing my chair over backward. My head cracked into the back of the chair, and for a moment, I saw bright lights. Then everything cleared, and I saw him standing over me, his eyes beginning to yellow.

“I’m going to like Changing you,” he said. “And once I do, we’ll be bonded in a way you can’t even imagine. If you think your connection to Callum’s pack is strong, you’ve seen nothing. Normal pack-bonds don’t hold a candle to what we have. Normal obedience is nothing compared to what you owe your Maker.”

He’d had a hold on Chase, even after Callum had claimed Chase as part of the Stone River Pack. I was pretty sure I knew exactly how strong that made the bond between a Changed werewolf and the person who brought them over. Chase had broken his, with my help and with Callum’s; if this psycho brought me over, I’d have to do the same.

Instead of shaking me, Wilson’s words gave me valuable information. They told me that he didn’t know what I’d done to my pack-bond. He didn’t know that I’d re-carved it, connecting myself first and foremost to Chase. He didn’t know that I’d done the same thing with Devon and Lake. This Rabid thought he knew so much about being resilient, but all he knew was how to fight. Maim. Kill. He didn’t know how to see pack-bonds as a threat to his safety, how to attack them, how to escape.

He didn’t know that I’d done it before and that if he brought me over, I’d do it again.

He was the one who didn’t know the depths of what he was. What I was. What all of the kids outside were.



He was the one who didn’t know what he was messing with.

“Your friends are here,” Wilson told me. As if I didn’t already know. As if I hadn’t felt them coming. As if I couldn’t see out of their eyes—all of their eyes at once. Bleeding and bloody, they were armed to the hilt, and right now, they didn’t care about the fact that the rest of Wilson’s wolves were victims.

Anyone who stood between them and me was fair game.

No, I wanted to say, don’t hurt them. But how could I? How could I tie my pack’s hands behind their backs, when the wolves outside were bound to kill them?

Bound to obey.

“You see now,” Wilson said, straightening my chair. “You understand. We’re all powerful, but the power? It’s mine.”

Mine.

Mine.

Mine.

The words echoed in my mind, and in that second I knew exactly what to do.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN


I’D THOUGHT IT MYSELF: W ILSON DIDN’T KNOW what it really meant to be resilient. He didn’t know how to use it for anything but blood.