“You’ll challenge Lucas,” I said softly, my voice full of knowing. “The second this is over.”
That was the real tragedy here, the thing that made this whole exercise pointless. Absurd. The moment Lucas had issued this challenge, he’d signed his own death warrant as much as mine. It didn’t matter if he was stronger than I was. There were plenty of people in my pack who were stronger than him, and they wouldn’t allow him to lead. They wouldn’t let him kill me and live another day.
Lucas was so far gone he couldn’t see it, and somehow, I doubted that Shay had pointed out the inevitability when he’d planted this suggestion in Lucas’s head.
Layers upon layers upon layers.
Shay had known that Lucas was going to do this. He’d broken him and sent him, broken, to me. He’d played me—the bet, the stakes, scratching on the eight ball when he must have always intended to lose. This was his fail-safe.
This was the endgame.
“You’re not going to die.” Devon spat the words right in my face. “You are not allowed to die.”
“Fine,” I said. “You win. I’ll just—oh, wait. I don’t have a choice.”
I didn’t want to be doing this—not with Dev, not with any of them. I didn’t want to say good-bye.
“There’s always a choice.” Dev tightened his grip and pulled me up onto the tips of my toes. “Do you think for one second that if all of this was going to end with you dead, Callum would have taken a hands-off policy and just let you die? Don’t you think he saw at least a hint of this coming? And if so, do you think he would have let you accept Lucas into this pack if he’d thought there was even the remotest chance that you might die over something so preventable, so useless?”
I thought of Callum telling me on the phone that I might die, never indicating, even for a second, that the danger extended past the coven per se.
Something caught inside me, like a breath catching in my throat.
“He must have seen it, Dev. He must not have cared.”
Devon let go of my arm, but he leaned down, bringing his face very close to mine. “You,” he said, “are the most impossible person I have ever met. You’re bulletproof and self-sacrificing and beautiful in ways that you will never understand. You are Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare. You turned the entire werewolf Senate upside down. You laugh in the face of danger. You are the alpha of this pack, and you are not going to die.”
As far as pep talks went, it was a good one, but Dev couldn’t stay there next to me. He couldn’t fight my battles for me. There was a mandate buried deep in the biology of his species that said he had to step back and watch.
So he did. He faded back into the circle, next to Maddy and Lake, next to Mitch, next to Chase, who was trying to get to me but couldn’t quite get his body to move.
I could feel his anguish, sewn into the air all around me, and the hum of the pack’s acknowledgment that a challenge to the alpha had to be met.
It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a Were; the mandate was there in my head, too. I felt it in the marks Callum had left in my skin. I felt it in the bond that made me who and what I was.
Fight. Fight. Fight.
It would have been so easy to give in to the instinct, to let the world go red and go out fighting without feeling a single instant of pain, but this time, flashing out seemed like giving up.
There had to be another answer.
There had to be.
The sound of Lucas Shifting tore me from my thoughts. How could I ever have thought he was scraggly or malnourished? He was hungry—there was a difference.
I felt the pain of his Shift as an echo in the bond that I’d thrown at him, and an image came to mind, of an old woman standing in front of three grown Weres, forcing them to halt mid-Shift.
I’m the alpha, I thought. Until he kills me, I’m the alpha.
Physically, I might have been the weaker party, but mentally, I was dominant. I always had been. There was a reason the Cedar Ridge Pack had chosen me as their leader, and it wasn’t my physique.
I pictured the bond that tied Lucas to the rest of the pack. I pictured the portion of it that tied him to me. I’d done that. Me. I couldn’t take it back, but there was a chance I could use it.
Lucas came toward me, and I stepped forward to meet him. I caught his eye, and I pushed. His lip curled and he leapt forward.
Stop! The command snapped out of me like it had been shot from a cannon and traveled through the pack-bond to Lucas, who jerked back suddenly to land a foot in front of me, just short of his goal. His teeth flashed and he let loose a sick and bone-crunching bark, but his body didn’t move. I could see the nails on his feet digging into the frozen ground as he strained against my hold.