Taken by storm(9)

But had I ever really been scared?

Jed smiled. With the scars on his face, it looked more like a grimace, but his eyes were twinkling. “Downright ironic, isn’t it?” he asked me.

“What?” I asked, though I had a sinking suspicion what he was going to say next.

“It’s ironic,” Jed said again, “that if you want to be stronger, the first thing you’re going to have to learn is how to let yourself be weak.”



Half an hour later, I was sitting in the dirt outside the cabin Jed shared with Caroline, awaiting instructions he seemed in no particular hurry to give. Oblivious to—or ignoring—my impatience, Jed took a seat on the ground beside me and reclined back on the heels of his hands.

“My way,” he reminded me.

“Your way,” I repeated. I wasn’t overjoyed with the prospect of more dirt sitting—or with the way he’d woken me up that morning—but I would have made a deal with the devil himself to find a way to control the power inside me, to make it something more than a defense mechanism.

Someday, waiting for the other guy to attack might get me killed.

“You know how to get there,” Jed said finally, breaking what felt like a small eternity of silence. “Deep down, you know. You just ain’t admitted it to yourself yet.”

He wasn’t talking about pain or panic or running like someone was on your heels. The kind of trigger Jed was talking about was something I wanted no part of.

Something I’d spent my entire life training myself not to do.

“Think of the worst thing that ever happened to you,” Jed told me. “Think of a time when you were cornered and trapped and terrified.”

Was that really what it took to summon up my Resilience, to fall into that state where nothing mattered but surviving and protecting the people I loved?

Where I was a faster, better Bryn?

“Every bad thing that’s ever happened to you.” Jed was implacable. “Every moment of terror, every loss, every time you had no power, and someone else had it all. One by one by one, Bryn. That’s the way.”

I’d said I would do anything for my pack. I’d said I would do this Jed’s way. So I did.

I started with recent memories, moments I spent all of my time trying to forget.

The look in Lucas’s eyes—hungry and desperate and dark—when he’d challenged my right to rule. The knowledge that had flooded my body in that instant, that a Were—any Were—was physically capable of killing me dead.

Dread built up inside of me, like bile rising in my throat, but I pressed on and thought of another heart-in-throat moment: seeing Devon lying still on the ground, blood pouring from a bullet wound in his heart. I thought of Lake missing a shot in a fateful game of pool and pretending that she wasn’t terrified that losing might mean spending the rest of her life as the property of Shay.

In the here and now, I was sweating. I was cold. But I wasn’t done yet. Forcing my muscles to relax, I went further, deeper, the memories flashing before my eyes at rapid speed.

I saw a man with violet eyes threatening to burn me to death in my sleep. I couldn’t fight back, couldn’t move—

I felt myself waking up in a cabin belonging to the monster who’d killed my parents, tied to a chair and wearing a frilly white dress designed for a little, little girl. The Rabid had touched me and cooed to me and backhanded me to the floor.

At the time, I hadn’t let myself be scared. Didn’t ever let myself be scared, but now …

I pictured myself standing still, as the members of Callum’s pack circled up around me. I pictured Sora, long and lean, her familiar face devoid of emotion. I pictured myself just standing there, heart pounding, knowing that if I fought back, I might die.

I remembered letting her break my ribs and bloody my lips, blacken my eyes and strip away every illusion I’d ever had that they were my family, that I was theirs.

“No.” I opened my eyes. I wasn’t going to do this. There was no sense in opening up old wounds when Shay would be calling a meeting of the Senate later today. This wasn’t the time for me to be feeling anything that might remind the other alphas of what I was.

Or, more to the point, of what I wasn’t.

“Sooner or later,” Jed said, opening his own eyes, “you get to the point where you know fear the way you know a lover. You know what it smells like. What it tastes like. How it feels.”

Listening to Jed use the words lover and taste in close proximity to each other was flat-out disturbing. His voice was dark and almost tender, and I just didn’t want to go there—on so many levels.

“You memorize that feeling, Bryn, and you build a place for it in your mind. You keep it under lock and key, and when you need to …” Jed’s pupils pulsed, and an instant later, he was behind me, his arm wrapped around my throat, crushing my windpipe and cutting off the flow of air.