But I did see the cue ball as it bounced off one corner and rolled slowly toward another. My eyes tracked its progression, my fight-or-flight instinct taking control of my body even as they did.
Survive. Survive. Survive.
An instant before I completely lost it and gave in to the desire to do to Shay what I had done to the psychics on the street, the cue ball disappeared off the table, falling into one of the side pockets. Something gave inside me, and the blood-red haze began to fade.
Shay had just scratched.
On most shots, it wouldn’t have mattered all that much, but I was familiar enough with pool to know that scratching on the eight ball meant forfeiting the game.
Shay had lost.
I was still trying to process this when Shay froze in his stride toward Lake.
Devon turned back toward the table. Lake grinned.
“Well,” she drawled, setting her own stick down, “that has to hurt.”
Lake had always been a horrible winner, and it took me a moment to find the naked, vulnerable relief underneath her gloating.
Shay scratched, I thought, letting myself believe it this time. He lost.
Beside me, I felt Chase reaching out, on the verge of saying something through the bond, but he must have decided against it, must have known how I would have taken it, because all there was between us was silence.
Relief painted my body with an unearthly, adrenaline-fueled glow. Lake was okay. I was okay. We were all okay—including Lucas, who Shay had just officially lost.
“Your permissions expire in a little over an hour,” I told Shay. “I expect you to retract your claim on Lucas and be off my land before then.”
I could feel Callum in the set of my jaw, the ease with which the words rolled off my tongue.
Shay snapped his pool cue in two, as easily as he could have—and would have—snapped my neck if it weren’t for Callum and the Senate. He stalked over to Lucas and lifted his limp body like a rag doll. Shay held him with one hand and flexed the fingers on the other until they began to take on the appearance of claws. He slashed his not-quite-human nails across Lucas’s face, and I felt the world shifting around us.
This was how pack transfers—the official kind—worked. The first alpha retracted his claim, cut off all mental ties, leaving the second alpha free to instate his—or in my case, her—own.
As I watched, unable to tear my eyes away, Shay wrenched his mind out of Lucas’s with all of the delicacy of a dentist using pliers to pull teeth.
“You are nothing to me,” he said, the words coming out more like a growl than any I’d ever heard spoken out loud. “I am nothing to you. If you step foot on Snake Bend territory again, I will kill you.”
With that, Shay dropped Lucas back onto the ground, and the younger Were’s back arched so hard and fast that I thought his body would snap in two.
“Lucas.” Maddy was by his side in an instant, and as the panic cleared from Lucas’s eyes and he met hers, I saw the contours of his face the way she did, felt his hand on hers as if it were mine.
Lone. Wolf.
My pack-sense trembled with the realization that Lucas didn’t feel foreign anymore—that now that Shay had released his hold, Lucas felt like something else altogether.
“He’s yours if you want him.” Shay kept his comment short and sweet. “But he’ll bring you nothing but trouble.”
That sounded more like a promise than a threat, and I thought of the psychics and everything Lucas had already led—however unwittingly—straight to our door.
“I doubt the Senate will be pleased when they find out you’ve been making deals with psychics.” I tossed the words out like they meant nothing, but I saw the moment they hit their mark. “I may be new to all of this, but I’m fairly certain that bringing the outside world into Pack matters is frowned upon.”
Shay recovered before I could fully register how deep my threat had cut. “The Senate would want proof,” he said, “and without my help, I doubt you’ll be alive to give it.”
Without his help? I snorted. Shay had orchestrated all of this. He’d forced my hand to allow him entry to my lands, he’d strong-armed me into wagering one of my wolves against one of his, and now that he’d lost, he was trying to offer me help?
“Your pack has one adult male, fewer than a dozen teenagers, and a handful of children. You can’t expect to face down a coven of psychics on your own.”
To my left, Devon’s eyes glittered. “Would this be the same coven of psychics who are attacking us at your request?”
Shay shrugged, the human gesture completely at odds with the feral glint in his eyes. “The why and the how don’t matter. If I were you, I’d be more concerned with the when.”