Trial by fire(67)

Sage just nodded, and for a moment, I saw things through her eyes, saw the men standing a hundred yards away from her, tracking her progression with hungry, lupine eyes.

I swore. Vehemently. And so loudly that Eric actually blushed.

Technically, Shay wasn’t breaking Pack Law. He couldn’t invade my territory without explicit permission to do so, but there was nothing to stop him from playing the intimidation card. From lining his troops up along our borders. From letting them make my wolves feel like they weren’t safe.

“He wants us to know that if we fight him, he’ll win.” Devon’s voice was sharp enough to maim, and there was no question in my mind whose blood he wanted—just like there was no question that someday Dev would go alpha. “He’s playing with you, Bryn.”

My fingers worked their way into a fist, my fingernails digging into the skin of my palms. “Like he was playing with us when he made a deal with Valerie to have her coven attack us on his behalf? Like he was playing when he let them cut and tear and burn Lucas into ribbons and ash, for no reason other than needing a victim to bait me into a confrontation?”

“If it’s any consolation,” Devon said, his voice low and comforting, “I’m going to kill him.”

“Dev—”

“Maybe not today. Maybe not this year. But five years from now, or ten, or fifty, or however long it takes for me to do it right, Shay is going to die. Maybe it will be long and brutal. Maybe it will be short and sweet. Maybe I’ll hate myself for it, or maybe I’ll enjoy it, but I will kill him for doing this to you. To them.”

I wondered what it said about my life that I could listen to my best friend calmly discussing dispatching his brother to the great beyond, without having any emotional reaction other than an acknowledgment, deep in my gut, of the fact that Dev could do it, would do it, was probably meant to do it.

According to Pack Law, if Devon killed Shay, he’d be the alpha of the Snake Bend Pack. He’d have to transfer packs first, and Shay would have to accept him, but given Shay’s ego and what Devon meant to me, Shay would probably allow it. For a moment, I almost felt like Callum, looking over the years to come and seeing the likelihood play out, right before my eyes.

Someday I would lose Devon.

Someday Dev would kill Shay.

Right now, however, thinking that far ahead was a luxury I couldn’t afford. The coven had us in their sights, and Jed’s warning that Valerie would repay my visit to her house in kind meant that I needed to be prepared for some sort of attack. Not five days later. Not after the deadline had passed.

Now.

Worse, if Shay wanted what I had badly enough to make deals with humans, I wasn’t entirely certain that Senate Law and the threat of Callum’s reprisal would be enough to keep him—and his men—on their side of our invisible line.

The phone rang, jarring me out of my thoughts and sending my heart pounding. Keely answered it, then turned toward me.

“It’s for you,” she said, holding the phone out across the bar. “It’s Shay.”



“I sent you an email.”

Of all of the things Shay could have opened with, that wasn’t one I’d expected at all.

“Does this email happen to explain why the entirety of the Snake Bend Pack is playing peekaboo across the border to my territory?”

Shay laughed, and it was a horrible, genial sound that made me want to put a fist through his trachea and pull out his spine. “I know you’re new at this,” he said, condescension and sly, understated viciousness fighting for control of his every word, “but there is a simple explanation for this kind of thing.”

He paused, and I pushed back the urge to bang the receiver into the wall over and over again until there was nothing left of either one of them.

“My pack goes where I go—within my own territory, of course. We’ve been in our current stronghold a long time, and quite frankly, I’ve been considering a move. To decrease the chance of exposure, of course.”

“Of course,” I replied dully. Shay’s picking up and moving his entire pack to the border between our territories could not possibly bode well for us, but there was no law against it.

He’s doing this by the book, I thought. I wasn’t sure whether the realization was comforting or not. The Senate wouldn’t be fond of the idea of an alpha aligning himself with a coven, but it wouldn’t give Callum the kind of justification he’d need to take Shay out of the picture without declaring himself the alpha of the entire North American continent. There was nothing in Pack Law to say that Shay couldn’t abuse his own subordinates, nothing to say he couldn’t bat me around like a cat with a mouse. But there was a law that said that Shay couldn’t step a foot on my territory without asking permission, and just like that, I knew why he’d called.