Ours. Ours. Ours.
This was our territory. These men were trespassing. And the wolves inside of each of my pack-mates knew beyond knowing that the pack was to be protected, the alpha was to be obeyed, and trespassers were to be killed.
What started as a low rumble in our bond became audible snarling, and even though I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of controlling anyone else—even if they’d chosen, and were still choosing, to let me—I pulled back tightly on my end of the bond, restraining them all with a single word. “Hold!”
“You?” It took me a second to locate the person speaking, and a few more beats to recognize him. He looked more like Devon than he should have, the expression on his face twisting familiar features into something ugly.
Shay.
I stiffened and let my senses reach past the borders of my new pack, my Resilient pack, and when I stepped out from behind the psychic shield of our numbers, the power in the room hit me like a blow to the stomach. I’d felt it before, in Chase’s body, but now, I felt something new. Instead of cowering or running away, my instinct was to protect what was mine: my territory, my wolves, my status. This was the Senate. These were alphas, but the roar of the pack I led at the edges of my mind, the way they held back on my command and my command only, forced me to accept an unforgiving, unlikely truth.
These men were alphas. So was I.
“Callum.” My eyes sought him out, and my mouth made the word of its own volition. I felt like I’d never said it before, like it was a word in a foreign language that I didn’t speak. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. Wasn’t sure what—or who—he was. To me.
To the wolves I was bound to protect.
“Bryn,” Callum returned calmly. “Seems you’ve gotten yourself into a bit of trouble.”
One of the other alphas snorted. “Where’s Wilson?”
“The Rabid?” I asked, seething warmth making its way from my stomach up the back of my throat and out of my mouth as pure venom. “The one who attacked and killed defenseless children in his pursuit of turning other kids into werewolves? The one who was using his ability to do so as a leg up into the Senate’s hierarchy? That Wilson?”
“Yes. That Wilson.” Shay didn’t like me. I met his eyes full-on and didn’t even blink. Let him not like me. The feeling was mutual.
“Oh,” I said lightly. “That Wilson is dead.”
Shay moved forward then, in a blindingly quick motion, and instinct told me that he would have closed his hand around my throat and slammed me against the nearest wall had it not been for the fact that in a move just as quick, each and every one of the wolves in my pack moved to defend me. Chase stepped directly in front of me, so close that my nose almost touched his back. Lake pulled to my side, and the children flanked her—even Lily, who twisted out of my grasp and leapt out toward Shay, her teeth flashing, like she hadn’t quite learned yet that they weren’t as potent in human form as they were when she was a wolf.
If I’d let her, she would have torn him to pieces.
But ultimately, it was Devon’s presence, massive and looming, that stilled Shay’s forward motion. The two of them faced off: Dev young and perfectly groomed, even in the middle of chaos; Shay a mirror of everything Dev could have been if he’d cared more about being a purebred werewolf than being a person.
“Back. Off.” Devon said the words slowly, giving each of them the weight of its own sentence. A ripple of unrest went throughout the room, the alphas shifting from one foot to another, their eyes on the confrontation.
Challenge.
Dev tilted his head slightly to the side, and I wondered which character he was playing, or if this was 100 percent Devon Macalister, down to the set of his jaw.
Challenge.
Dominance.
“Dev.” I said his name quietly, knowing this could get ugly if I didn’t stop it. At the sound of my voice, Devon broke eye contact with Shay and took a step back, closer to me.
“She’s their alpha,” a man who smelled like sea salt and sulfur breathed, his green eyes flecked with yellow, his pupils widening. “The children think they’re hers.”
They didn’t just think they were mine, I wanted to say. They were mine. I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t exactly see the logic behind the choice, but there it was.
I was the one who’d set them free.
I was the one who’d showed them what they could do. I was the person they’d chosen to connect to, and because I’d started it all, I was at the center of the things that connected us all.
I was theirs. And even though I was their alpha, even the smallest of my pack-mates seemed to sense that I was also the most vulnerable. The weakest physically. The one that Shay wanted to disembowel.