They could speak to me silently. I could make myself heard in their minds, but our pack-bond wasn’t exactly a two-way street. I was the alpha and they were my pack, and nature hadn’t designed werewolves to know their alpha the way he knew them.
She, I corrected myself silently. I wasn’t male. I wasn’t a werewolf, and there was nothing in the rule book to say that I couldn’t make it a two-way street.
I stepped forward, my head bowed—not in submission, but in something closer to prayer. I brought one hand to Lake’s cheek and another to Devon’s. I brushed the side of my face against Chase’s neck. I closed my eyes, and I let go.
For this moment, in this private midnight congress, I didn’t have to be alpha. I didn’t have to be the strong one. Chase had tried telling me that. So had Ali. For the first time, I could almost believe it—believe that I didn’t have to fight this battle alone.
I felt their breath on my skin. Heat leapt from their bodies to mine, and for all the perfect silence of the forest, the sounds inside my head rose.
I let out a ragged breath, pushing down the animal desire to howl. The scars on my hip bone felt like lines of liquid fire against my skin, but I didn’t fight it. I didn’t try to control the bond.
I let it control me.
I let them in.
I didn’t say anything to them. I let them see it for themselves: everything I thought, everything I felt. I let them sift through my mind, and with the part of me that was alpha screaming, I forced my body still, until the muscles in the back of my neck melted away, leaving my head lying on Chase’s shoulder, the way it had when he’d spent the night.
Devon nuzzled my right palm. Lake brought the tips of her fingers to touch my face. My mind and my body and every part of my being were so full of the three of them—what they were and what we were together—that there wasn’t room for anything else.
Anyone else.
Being alpha meant always being inside everyone else’s heads and never letting them inside yours, protecting the pack and never needing their protection—but it also meant that if the coven got inside my head, they’d have free access to everyone else’s.
Not anymore.
“When Chase spent the night, Archer couldn’t find me in my dreams.” I heard the words as I whispered them, felt the soft sound wrapping its way around each of their bodies. “If we’re lucky, having the three of you inside me will be enough to keep all of them out.”
And what if it’s not, Bryn? I recognized Lake’s voice in my mind, and for a split second, I saw an image of the two of us when we were eight or nine, suntanned and skinny-limbed and laughing.
I brought my hand to Lake’s and pressed my nails into the skin of her wrist, dragging them softly downward, leaving my mark.
You’re going to protect me, I told her, the way you always have, and if it doesn’t work, you’re going to protect the pack.
It wasn’t an order, but it wasn’t a question, either, because I knew them, and they knew me, and there wasn’t a single one of us who didn’t already know how this was going to end.
Lake met my eyes, her own blazing, and then left her mark on my palm. The exchange was symbolic, the kind of formality our pack had never observed, but somehow, my dominance spreading among the four of us, their inner wolves as much a presence in my mind as theirs, it seemed appropriate.
Devon.
Chase.
Two more times, my fingers laid marks into someone else’s skin. Two more times, marks were laid upon me. When we finished here, I’d go into the lion’s den to take out the lion, knowing that I wasn’t alone, that if something happened to me, my friends would take care of our pack, even if it meant hurting me.
With the wind whipping through my hair, I knelt and lifted my head to the waning moon. I breathed. They breathed. And when they Shifted, and I felt the rush of wild power, bittersweet and pure, I wondered if this time, they felt me in the same way I felt them.
If being a part of me made them just a little bit more human.
I was still alpha. I always would be, but the constant rhythm in their minds as I buried my hands in their fur wasn’t alpha. It was Bryn.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I SHOWED UP ON THE COVEN’S FRONT PORCH LOOKING every inch the runaway. My hair was a tangled mess, my clothes still smudged with forest dirt. My teeth were chattering, and I had a duffel bag slung over one shoulder.
Ali was going to kill me.
Waltzing straight into the belly of the beast wasn’t exactly a mother-approved kind of plan. In a few hours, when Ali woke up and found me gone, there would be hell to pay, and I was seriously glad that I wouldn’t be the one around to pay it. I was only about 60 percent sure that Lake and Devon would be able to keep her from charging in after me—and only the fact that my friends had open access to my mind and would know the second things went south made me rate their chances that high.