“As alpha of the Stone River Pack, I speak on behalf of my brothers in saying that I grant you these permissions, under the conditions as follow.”
I was prepared to hear this part, and I found myself strangely grateful that I was Callum’s and that he’d broken protocol enough to give me forewarning. I gave the requisite answers as he told me again about the way I would be expected to submit to those who accompanied me on my meetings, open my bond to the pack until this business was concluded, and run with them tonight.
And then Callum told me the last requirement. “In exchange for this favor, you will excuse yourself from any meetings involving the North American Senate for the next five months.”
This was … unexpected. All of Callum’s other conditions involved me becoming more a part of the pack, and being a good little pack daughter, but this one pushed me away. The Senate didn’t convene on a regular basis, and frankly, I had no desire to be there when they did. My bond with Callum connected me to his pack, and it made me smell like Stone River—and Callum—to other Weres, but I wasn’t connected to any of the other alphas on the Senate. I didn’t feel safe around them, and the artifice of bureaucracy surrounding the Senate did nothing to conceal the amount of testosterone pushing each of the alphas to test his dominance against the others. The eight of them had a gentlemen’s agreement not to challenge each other, but I didn’t relish being in a room with men nearly as strong as Callum who weren’t bound by his word to keep me safe.
“I agree to this condition, Alpha,” I said.
Was that relief on Callum’s face? My stomach twisted sharply as his features settled back into an unreadable mask, and I had a single second to wonder if he knew something that I didn’t.
Callum knew better than to leave me wondering long. His voice boomed out around me, calm and cool, saturated with power caged, and my thoughts stilled until all I saw was Callum, and all I heard were his words.
“Our conditions have been set and agreed to. The agreement is sealed.” Callum took a step toward me and dug his fingernails slightly into my bare shoulder blade—not enough to draw blood, because this time, the motion was for show and carried symbolic but not literal power. In response, I bowed my head and then reached forward, my nails digging into his flesh, putting my seal on the agreement.
Bryn.
There it was again, the push at the outside of my psyche, and I realized that this time, the reminder was less about prodding me to pay attention and more of a gentle push against my defenses.
The defenses that I’d just agreed to let down.
I bit my bottom lip and nodded, and as I closed my eyes and walked myself backward through everything I’d done over the years to close myself off from them, to protect myself, to become my own person, a sob got caught in my throat. Callum might as well have ordered me to take off my clothes and let these men watch the strip show. I would be humiliated, laid bare, and vulnerable. Naked in every way that mattered.
Bryn. The echo was calming this time, but closer—under my skin instead of on top of it—and I shuddered, but pushed forward.
I took the things that were most me, the secrets I guarded most dearly, the dreams I’d see die before I revealed them, and I folded them into a tiny ball, tucking them away in my heart, in a place that went deeper than words or fears or emotions. I pictured that ball—a tiny sphere of light—and I promised myself that it would still be intact when I came back to retrieve it, that I’d still be me when all was said and done. If Callum saw what I was doing, his amber eyes gave no hint of that knowledge, and I heard his voice in my head again.
Bryn.
Giving in to its hypnotic call, I went back in the maze of my mind as far as I could remember, to the last time I’d stood before this Crescent, four years old and following Callum’s edict to look at him, only at him, as he Marked me as his own. Ali had stood beside me then, all of twenty-one, and I wondered if she’d felt the way that I felt now. If she’d let them violate her for my sake.
And then I raised my eyes to Callum’s, just as I had then, and I told him, with every part of myself, that I was his. That I was Pack. And that, for the first time since I’d learned to close myself off from the overwhelming will of the pack, I was really theirs, too.
Communal awareness came at me from all sides, like a wave knocking me off my feet and down into the undertow. My first instinct was to fight it, to run, to slam my mental walls back up ten times stronger than they’d been before, but they pulled at me, my pack-mates—their minds, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Their togetherness. Their wolves. And even though I didn’t have another creature inside of me to respond to theirs, my body seemed completely unaware of this fact. I needed to be with them. Closer to them. Among them.