Slowly, I unraveled his interactions with me. He’d come to save me when I was four, because he’d known I’d need saving, but he hadn’t gotten the vision in time to save my parents as well. And when he’d failed on that front, he’d seen horrible things in my future if he left me there, so he took me with him. And he’d known that the pack wouldn’t accept me unless they had to, so he’d Marked me and forced their hands, and he’d seen that he couldn’t give me to any of the other wolves or keep me himself without putting me at the center of a firestorm, so he’d chosen Ali and shown her what awaited me if she said no.
And then I flashed forward, and I saw myself from his perspective, the moment I’d heard those three little words from Chase’s lips.
I got bit.
The possibilities in my future rearranged themselves, and Callum fought against them, trying to keep me safe. It was the reason he’d kept Chase away from me—down that path had been danger, and at the time, it had been the last thing that Callum had wanted for me. He’d always known that I’d be important someday, but he hadn’t foreseen the way I’d come to be a part of him. He hadn’t realized that he couldn’t always be the one saving me.
And from the moment I’d met Chase, he’d known. He’d known what could happen, known a thousand ways it could have gone wrong. I’d asked permissions, and he’d laid down the conditions. He’d trained me—not for fear of what might happen during my meeting with Chase, but in preparation for what I would face afterward. He’d made me open my pack-bond so that I would connect to Chase, not to keep me from it.
And then came the hardest thing to see, the hardest decision he’d made. Telling me to obey the others.
But if he hadn’t wanted to keep me from Chase, if he hadn’t been trying to keep the Rabid a secret—why?
Because, his eyes seemed to whisper, you had to leave.
If he hadn’t given me the order, I wouldn’t have disobeyed it. If I hadn’t disobeyed it, he couldn’t have had Sora beat me, and Ali would never have taken me away. And if I’d never left Callum’s territory, I wouldn’t have had the time or the space or the room to grow up. I wouldn’t have recruited Lake to our fight. I wouldn’t have been forced to use the dreamscape to communicate with Chase. I wouldn’t have found my way into the Rabid’s head.
Changing one piece of the puzzle changed them all, and this was something that Callum had constructed very carefully.
I came back into my own body and sat down hard on the ground. I’d realized that Callum had probably planned for me to throw Shay’s line about democracy back in his face, that he’d known or at least suspected that the Rabid’s victims would claim me as their alpha, but I hadn’t really let myself hope that I was anything more than a detail.
That to Callum, the big picture had always gone back, again and again, to me.
For months, years, maybe my entire life, Callum had been preparing me to save the children Wilson had Changed; he’d been pulling my strings and Chase’s and everyone else’s. And that moment—the one that had nearly destroyed me—when he’d ordered me beaten, he’d done it not to save face with the pack, but because he needed Ali to take me to Montana.
He’d done it for me.
“I’m not sorry for it, Bryn. I’d do it again. And I needed you to know that.”
I got the feeling that he wasn’t here looking for forgiveness, and he wasn’t here just to let me know that even when I thought he’d left me, I’d been loved. He was warning me—because sometime, down the line, his knack for seeing and manipulating the future might involve me again. Depending on what he foresaw—for his pack, for me, and for mine—he might be left with some tough choices and he wouldn’t promise to deal me in, not if keeping me in the dark pushed things in the direction he wanted them to go.
I nodded. “Consider it known,” I said. “And for the record—everything I did? I’d do it again. And if it ever comes down to the safety of my pack versus the safety of yours …”
Callum smiled. “Consider it known.”
There was something about the expression on his face that made me suspicious, made me wonder if it was starting already. If he knew something that I didn’t.
“It’s not going to come down to the safety of my pack versus the safety of yours, is it?” I asked. “At least not immediately. There’ll be other threats. Outside threats. The other alphas, maybe. Or something worse.” I paused. He said nothing, and I knew without asking that I couldn’t push my way back into his head no matter how hard I tried.