Trial by fire(89)

Even the babies, who didn’t know what they were feeling or where that aching, fathomless loneliness had come from, were in a state, mourning a loss they wouldn’t begin to understand for years. And then there was Lucas, his presence a jarring reminder of the outside world, one the pack wasn’t in the mood to tolerate, let alone accept.

“Bryn?”

I was lying in Chase’s bed, his body curled next to mine as he slept, when Maddy approached. Her gaze was aimed at the floor, her eyes round and her breathing shallow. I listened for her through the pack-bond, but for once, her mind wasn’t on running, or the pack, or what we’d become together as soon as night fell.

There was only one word in her mind, only one emotion.

LucasLucasLucasLucas.

I didn’t try to make sense of the intensity of it. I didn’t weed through her mind to find the moment when she’d known, the way Chase had with me. Instead, I sent my words through the bond to her.

Look at me, Maddy.

She lifted her eyes, and I wondered how we’d come to this: her approaching me not as a friend, but as a member of my pack. I’d never asked for that kind of deference. I didn’t want it. Now that the threat was gone—for now, at least—I just wanted things to go back to the way they were before.

Even with Chase beside me, Callum’s words about being alpha—the weight, the responsibility, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that someday I’d die to keep my pack safe—were still there.

“We’re running tonight,” Maddy said, interjecting the words into my thoughts.

“Yeah, Mads. We are.” I kept my voice soft, unwilling to spook her. “What happened, with Eric … We need to be together. We need to let go.”

“Will you claim Lucas?” There was strength in the tilt of Maddy’s head, just like there was a simple grace to her words. She’d fought long and hard to be this person, and now she was willing and ready to fight for him. “I know it seems wrong, with Eric and everything, but Lucas needs a pack, and I need it to be ours.”

As I looked at her and listened to the pattern of her thoughts hovering just out of reach, it was easy to see the truth in Ali’s cautionary tale, easy to believe that Maddy’s wolf had made this decision for her, that love was an instinct for werewolves, not an emotion. Chase had told me once, a lifetime ago, that as a human, before the Change, he’d loved four things—and one of them was me. Forget that he hadn’t ever seen me or talked to me or even known in any concrete way that I existed. Forget that when he’d spoken the words, we’d met exactly twice.

His wolf had known, and Chase had known, the same way Maddy—and Lucas—did now.

“I was always going to claim him, Maddy. I didn’t win him from Shay just to send him away.”

It didn’t matter if Lucas was damaged, or that he’d come here believing that doing so would put our pack in danger. He’d never really had a chance, and I could give him that. For better or for worse, he was Maddy’s, and that made him ours.

“Tonight,” I told her, and the strain melted off her body like she was shedding a second skin. She glowed, practically luminescent, and I felt a deep hum of approval, of contentment through the bond.

For the first time since we’d saved her from the Rabid—since she’d saved herself—she felt sure of herself.

She felt whole.



The moon wasn’t full. The snow on the ground was fresh. Our numbers were diminished, and the forest still smelled like blood, but the energy running through and around us was no less palpable than it had been the last time the Cedar Ridge Pack had met.

The need to shed my own skin, to be one of them, was no less real.

Five feet from the spot where the others had buried Eric, Lucas stood, hunched and waiting. To a lone wolf, standing in the middle of another pack, knowing he didn’t belong must have been torture.

I glanced sideways at Chase. As far as I was concerned, he shouldn’t have even been out of bed. As far as he was concerned, I shouldn’t have granted Maddy’s request to claim Lucas until I’d had at least a few more days to heal myself.

And there it was again. I was the alpha; Chase was putting my welfare above the pack’s. Love was so much less complicated when I was halfway dead.

As if he knew exactly what I was thinking, Chase gave a wry little smile and brought his head to rest on top of mine. I can’t help it, he said. And neither can you.

Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

The call pushed Chase back from my body, and as he melted into the rest of the pack, I searched for the right words to say to the others. Our pack had never been much on ceremony. On the nights when we ran together, the power just burst out of us, like water breaking through a hole in a dam. At most, I nodded to usher it in, but this wasn’t just another night at the clearing.