“There’s not.”
She put her face right next to mine. “But if there is, you tell me. You tell me, and I will fix this.”
Pack business didn’t work that way, but it would have taken a braver soul than I to tell Ali that.
“I don’t want to take it back. And I really do have to—”
She didn’t let me finish. “You have to eat, you have to make your bed, and you have to run a brush through that hair of yours before you leave this house, but at the moment, that’s all you have to do.”
“That’s not the way permissions work, Ali.”
Her eyes narrowed, and my pack-sense backed my common sense in telling me to roll belly-up and let her have her way on this one.
“You’re not the first person in the world to deal with the pack, Bryn. I know how permissions work.”
The things she didn’t say hung in the air between us: what she’d asked for, what she’d been forced to give. Whether she’d bargained on her own behalf, or—more likely—if she’d sacrificed bits and pieces of her autonomy over time to buy me mine. The questions were on the tip of my tongue, but Ali preempted my words by slapping some eggs on the plate in front of me.
“I know what you have to do to survive here, Bryn. I’ve been doing it for both of us for a very long time, but for the record, when I said that you didn’t have to go to training today, I wasn’t trying to start a fight with you.” She sat down in the chair next to me and stared at my eggs, refusing to meet my eyes. Her voice went very soft. “Callum called. He’s joining us right after breakfast, and then the two of you are going back to his place.”
“Just the two of us?” I asked, trying not to tip my hand and let her see the flicker of hope building inside me.
“Casey will be going as well,” Ali said. “Sora and Lance might be there, too.”
Three wolves.
Three babysitters.
Three bodyguards.
“I’m going to see him?”
The tone in my voice left no question as to who the “him” in question was.
“Yes, baby. You are.”
Ali hadn’t called me baby in so long. All of a sudden, I felt like the world’s most ungrateful brat for fighting with her.
“I’m going to see him.”
The words weren’t the apology I’d been aiming for, but Ali seemed to understand. “Yeah.”
It felt like I’d be working toward this for so long that somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten that there was an end goal. Now that it was here and real, I couldn’t believe it. Not at all.
“You’re going to see him. You’ll ask him what you need to ask him. You’ll do what you need to do. And then, this will all be over. No more permissions. No more conditions. Just us.”
No more fights.
No more bond.
No more running with the pack when the moon was full.
I’d be me again. The me Ali wanted me to be. I thought of the ball I’d visualized before I’d let down my shields that night at the Crescent and given myself over to the pack-mentality. The things I’d wanted and been before.
Were they still there, safe where I’d left them? Could I go back? Did I want to?
“Go on,” Ali told me. “Get dressed. Make your bed. And for heaven’s sakes, Bryn, brush your hair. You’re starting to look like a cavegirl.”
“Bryn want kill dinosaur,” I said, pantomiming what I thought passed for a decent dinosaur-killing motion.
For the first time in weeks, Ali laughed. “Go on. And if you’re very good, Ali show Bryn big heaping secret. Fiiiiiirrrre. Make tasty warm dinosaur meat.”
I snorted. “Dork.”
“Right back at ya, kiddo.”
The exchange felt so normal. So human. So far from whatever it was that I was becoming, day by day. Now that I was going to see Chase, an insane part of me wanted him to see this Bryn—the one who laughed with Ali, not the one who Callum had molded into a paragon of self-defense.
“I’m going to see him,” I said, testing out the sound of the words, wondering which me Chase would meet. “Today.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“CASEY, IF THERE’S A HAIR ON HER HEAD OUT OF place when you get back, you’re sleeping on the couch for the rest of your life.” Ali kissed her husband as she said those words, but he didn’t take her any less seriously for it. She moved to turn her threats on Callum, but he shook his head at her.
“Have I ever returned her to you in worse shape than I took her?” he asked.
Ali opened her mouth to answer, and my sarcasm barometer sensed an oncoming change in pressure, but Callum just gave Ali the eyebrow arch that she’d given me.