Raised by Wolves(107)

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.

“I didn’t kill Wilson.” My voice—barely more than a whisper—echoed with the power of the entire pack, a frenzied blood-thirst that made me sound less human than I was. “They did. The ones he Changed. The ones you let him Change.”

Lily growled, and coming from a cherubic two-year-old, the sound seemed more demonic than lupine.

“They’re free now,” I continued, my voice still echoing with power that wasn’t mine. “And nobody gets to them except through me.”

“You can’t honestly believe we’d let you keep them,” Shay said, his tone incredulous. Every instinct I had said that he was challenging me and that staring him down almost definitely wasn’t going to get me out of this one. Like flame and tinder, the challenge caught on; I could feel it spreading across the room from one alpha to another. They were stronger than I was. One on one, I didn’t stand a chance against any of them. Even surrounded by Resilient werewolves who’d do anything I asked them to, I was outclassed. Resilient or not, my wolves were just kids, and every alpha in this room except me numbered their years in centuries.

I’m not backing down. I tried to let them see that in my face. I may have been outclassed, but if these alphas thought they could take even one of these kids from me when they’d been perfectly content to leave them to a Rabid in exchange for new wolves of their own, they were mistaken.

I won’t back down. Not now. Not ever. Even if I was signing my own death warrant.

My gaze flickered over to Callum, and his amber eyes focused on mine in a way that made me wonder if he was seeing me at four or five or six or ten, or any age up until the point that Ali had taken me away.

Bryn. I didn’t hear his voice in my head, but I saw that single word—my name—in his eyes. Saw the recognition behind it. The feeling. And something else: a look I knew, one I’d seen many times before. It was a look that pushed me. One that challenged me to take everything he’d ever taught me and think. There was a way out of this dilemma, but I had to find it and set it in motion myself.

So I did what Callum’s eyes bid me and thought. And the answer was there, in everything I knew about the men in this room and everything Callum had taught me about maneuvering my way around werewolves.

“Actually,” I said, finally responding to Shay’s words, my eyes still on Callum’s, “I do think you’ll let me keep them. Because this isn’t Europe. This isn’t Asia. And in North America, alphas don’t take other alphas’ wolves. We don’t challenge each other, and if you want to take what’s mine, you’re going to have to challenge me.”

You’re going to have to kill me. Those words went unstated, but every single person in the room understood that they were there, and a wave of static energy pulsed through the air. Alphas didn’t like being challenged. Especially not by females. Especially not by humans.