Raised by Wolves(104)

I did.

I closed my eyes and thought of Chase. I thought of Wilson. I thought of Madison, the grinning six-year-old, and Madison, the ghost of a girl who’d greeted me when I woke up. I thought of what it meant to be a survivor myself, and I cast my mind outward, looking for that in them. The power was twisted in Wilson. Ugly. Dark. And that darkness bled onto the others, tainted them.

Madison leapt, and Chase met her midair, their teeth snapping at each other’s throats. To their left, Lake took aim and fired at one of the other wolves—small but vicious. My friends and my kind clashed, and their directives pulsed in my head and my veins, until they were all I could hear.

Protect.

Protect.

Obey.

Obey.

Save Bryn.

Kill them all.

I don’t know where the burst of strength came from, and I didn’t question it. I just shoved my arms outward, straining against the ropes, and they snapped, with the fury of a mother throwing a car off her baby boy. Like a wild thing—a whirl of energy and rage and pulse after pulse of something that I couldn’t name—I jumped out of the chair. But instead of going for Wilson’s throat, instead of killing him, I ran for the door.

My first order of business wasn’t payback. It was salvation, and right now there was so much at stake.

“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.