My chest tightened, and I could almost hear the sound of glass shattering as something inside me broke, but I couldn’t risk letting anyone else see the breaking, so I kept my face carefully neutral, like someone who’d learned from the very best.
“I think we’re done here,” I said, daring the alphas, any single one of them, to tell me we weren’t. “You can see yourselves to the door.” For a moment, I thought Callum would throw his head back and roar with laughter, but he didn’t. He just glanced up at the ceiling as one by one, I met the other alphas’ gazes, and one by one, they turned away and filed out the door, their hatred for me and the way Callum had tied their hands palpable in the air. As I watched them go, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someday they’d be back. Maybe not to this cabin. Maybe not anytime soon, but eventually, some or all of these alphas would decide that the prize was worth the gamble. They’d call Callum’s bluff and take their chances. And when they did, things were going to get ugly.
Finally, I brought my face back to Callum’s, and out of habit, my hand went to my waist, to the Mark that had once connected the two of us into something more. For a moment, I felt a pang for what we’d lost, but that longing was drowned out by a moment of prescience, one that told me that Callum knew as well as I did that this wasn’t the end.
Not between the two of us and not with the Senate. Someday, the other alphas would strike back.
And when they did, we’d be ready. I’d be ready.
For the first time in my life, Callum looked away from my gaze before I looked away from his, a slight, knowing smile playing at the corners of his lips. Then, without a word, he turned and followed the other alphas out the door, until the only ones left in the cabin were the ones whose minds and heartbeats I knew as well as my own. The ones whose strength and power pulled at me from all directions, with the familiar call of alpha, alpha, alpha.
Pack, pack, pack, I whispered back, my mind to theirs. Let’s run.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“HEY, COULD I GET A REFILL ON THIS COFFEE?”
“That depends,” Lake said, looking at the customer with dancing eyes before turning to shout toward the bar. “Maddy, you want me to shoot him?”
Maddy—who’d joined Lake as a waitress and proven that the only thing more terrifying than one of them was two—pretended to think it over for a moment and then shook her head. “If you shoot him, it’ll take him longer to run far, far away. And besides, it might hurt your tip.”
Lake turned back to the man in question—one of many Weres who’d ventured into the Wayfarer in the two months since it had become the center of a new territory. Montana and western North Dakota no longer belonged to the Stone River Pack. The Wayfarer and the land surrounding it for a good hundred miles on either side belonged to the newly minted Cedar Ridge Pack, courtesy of Callum.
Technically speaking, the new territory belonged to me.
There was a part of me—the human part—that still believed it was all semantics, that I was an alpha in name only, because Weres couldn’t understand the idea of a pack without one. But there was another part—the part of me that knew every second of every day where each and every one of my wolves was—that recognized that the title wasn’t a meaningless one. It wasn’t empty.
It was real.
But it was different, too, from the way things had been in Callum’s pack. The wolves in Cedar Ridge and I were all connected, but until or unless we were threatened, I didn’t control that connection, and I didn’t use it to control anyone else. I hadn’t spent my entire life referring to Callum as a patriarch only to turn into his female counterpart overnight. If there was a problem, I solved it. If they needed me, I was there, but in their human lives, the wolves in my pack could choose when to follow me and when not to, and most of the time, I didn’t make an active attempt at leading. It wasn’t like Lake was ever going to let me live under the delusion that I ran things. She bossed me around as much as she always had, and that wasn’t even taking her dad or Keely or Ali into account.
None of the adults in our lives had been particularly pleased with our adventure to Alpine Creek. Our parents had arrived at the cabin just after the battle of wills with the Senate had ended—and needless to say, Lake and I hadn’t fared quite as well against Ali and Mitch as we had against the entire werewolf establishment. I’d spent most of the summer grounded, and with the new school year fast approaching, Ali and Mitch had only backed off because, laissez-faire alpha or not, my mood tended to trickle down into the others, and a pack of stir-crazy juvenile wolves was nobody’s friend.