Besides, with werewolves, control was the name of the game.
Never flinch.
Never show your anger.
Never let them see you cry.
It was disgustingly easy for me to shove my emotions into a box in the back of my mind, to slip into alpha mode and mimic Callum’s facial expressions, his posture. But now, with the bathroom door standing in between me and the others, I could finally let myself breathe. I could remember.
I could feel.
Flipping on the shower, I let the sound of water beating against marble drown out my jagged breathing. I slid slowly to the floor, a mess by every sense of the word. My hair was tangled and matted to my forehead. My feet were streaked with dirt, my earlier wounds ugly and scabbed. Beneath my year-round suntan, my face was pale, and when I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, my lips were pressed into a thin and colorless line.
For a few seconds, I thought I might actually cry. That was so unlike me, I wasn’t sure how to respond. Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare didn’t get sad. She got mad. Or better, she got even.
Why was I letting this get to me? I’d known from the moment I’d survived Shay’s last attempt on my life that he would have another plan, and another, and another. I’d known I’d have to see him again face-to-face, that I’d have to play politics when I wanted nothing more than to tear out his throat. But the idea of doing it in a room full of alphas who felt the same way about me that Shay did, who had voted to let the last four-legged psychopath get away with it because human lives—my life, Chase’s, the lives of innocent children, my parents’—weren’t worth much when you stacked them up against the secret to making female Weres?
That made me sick.
Natural-born female werewolves were rare enough that the other alphas would have let the rabid wolf who killed my parents keep right on killing, so long as he delivered on his promise to supply them with a constant flow of girls who’d been born human and Changed into Weres.
Now both the Rabid and the secret to pulling off that trick were buried, and as far as Shay and the other alphas were concerned, that was my fault. If they’d had any idea I knew what the last Rabid had known, that Callum knew—
Bryn.
I heard Chase in my mind long before I sensed his physical approach. The closer he got, the further away everything else seemed—the knowledge that this time tomorrow, I’d be headed for a Senate meeting; the unwanted memories; the frustration and rage and worry that wouldn’t do me a speck of good. Instead, I felt Chase. His presence. His thoughts.
Even when I shut my mind off to the rest of the pack, Chase was there.
He wasn’t strong the way Devon was, or as brash and fearless as Lake. He didn’t understand me—or my priorities—the way someone with alpha instincts would have, and if it hadn’t been for me, he would have left our little pack long ago—but Chase excelled at being there. Physically, emotionally, he was there and he was steady, and I didn’t question, even for a second, that he’d love me just the same no matter what I said or did or felt or didn’t feel.
Sitting very still, I closed my eyes and waited. Waited until Chase’s presence wasn’t just a shadow over my mind. Waited until I could feel his breath on my face, until I could smell him, cedar and cinnamon and home.
I opened my eyes. There he was, inches away from me, close enough to touch. The constant hum of the shower faded into the background. I let go of the barriers in my mind. In an instant, everything that had happened passed from my mind to Chase’s. My hands found their way to the sides of his face. My palms were warm with the heat of his skin, and I concentrated on that—on feeling him, touching him—and not thinking about what tomorrow might bring.
“Shay’s going to call?” Chase asked, leaning into my touch.
I nodded. “Callum said we’ll have a few hours after the call comes in before we’ll need to leave. Sora will be joining him at the edge of Snake Bend territory. I’ll be taking Dev.”
Chase didn’t stiffen, didn’t react in any way, but I could feel in the pit of my stomach that he hated not being the one to go with me. He had no desire to fight Devon for dominance; he would never treat me as if I were some kind of prize to be won, but Chase didn’t like the idea of my walking headlong into danger without him.
He didn’t like knowing that there were times when he couldn’t have my back.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, and somehow, saying the words to Chase made them feel true. “I can do this.”
A rueful half smile cut across the boyish features of his face. “Of course you can.”
He pressed his lips into my palm, and I heard the rest of his words in my mind, felt them in the surface of my skin.