Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (85 page)

That was the reason werewolves didn’t attack humans.

That was the reason a Were who hunted without authorization was normally executed, no questions asked.

I met Callum’s eyes, and this time, neither one of us looked away. I knew then what he wasn’t saying, why he’d risked trespassing on my territory to give me warning that Shay was about to call.

“It’s happening again,” I said, my mind going back to the
last time, to a werewolf who hunted humans and the things that he had done to my family, to the kids in my pack, to Chase, and to me. “Shay isn’t calling the Senate as some kind of power play.” The words stuck in my throat, but I pushed them out. “He’s calling this meeting because there’s a Rabid.”

CHAPTER FOUR

H
OURS LATER, WHEN
I
CREPT INTO THE BATHROOM
and shut the door behind me, a sense of overwhelming relief flooded my body. Around the others—around Callum—I had to be strong. Showing weakness to a member of another pack was not an option, and I couldn’t afford to let my feelings about this development infect the rest of my own pack, either. Devon would be accompanying me to the Senate meeting as my second-in-command. Coming face-to-face with Shay, knowing his brother wanted me dead—that would be hard enough for Dev. He didn’t need my emotional baggage making it any worse.

Besides, with werewolves, control was the name of the game.

Never flinch.

Never show your anger.

Never let them see you cry.

It was disgustingly easy for me to shove my emotions into a box in the back of my mind, to slip into alpha mode and mimic Callum’s facial expressions, his posture. But now, with
the bathroom door standing in between me and the others, I could finally let myself breathe. I could remember.

I could feel.

Flipping on the shower, I let the sound of water beating against marble drown out my jagged breathing. I slid slowly to the floor, a mess by every sense of the word. My hair was tangled and matted to my forehead. My feet were streaked with dirt, my earlier wounds ugly and scabbed. Beneath my year-round suntan, my face was pale, and when I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, my lips were pressed into a thin and colorless line.

For a few seconds, I thought I might actually cry. That was so unlike me, I wasn’t sure how to respond. Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare didn’t get sad. She got mad. Or better, she got even.

Why was I letting this get to me? I’d known from the moment I’d survived Shay’s last attempt on my life that he would have another plan, and another, and another. I’d known I’d have to see him again face-to-face, that I’d have to play politics when I wanted nothing more than to tear out his throat. But the idea of doing it in a room full of alphas who felt the same way about me that Shay did, who had voted to let the last four-legged psychopath get away with it because human lives—my life, Chase’s, the lives of innocent children,
my parents’
—weren’t worth much when you stacked them up against the secret to making female Weres?

That made me sick.

Natural-born female werewolves were rare enough that the other alphas would have let the rabid wolf who killed my parents keep right on killing, so long as he delivered on his promise to supply them with a constant flow of girls who’d been born human and Changed into Weres.

Now both the Rabid and the secret to pulling off that trick were buried, and as far as Shay and the other alphas were concerned, that was my fault. If they’d had any idea I knew what the last Rabid had known, that Callum knew—

Bryn
.

I heard Chase in my mind long before I sensed his physical approach. The closer he got, the further away everything else seemed—the knowledge that this time tomorrow, I’d be headed for a Senate meeting; the unwanted memories; the frustration and rage and worry that wouldn’t do me a speck of good. Instead, I felt Chase. His presence. His thoughts.

Even when I shut my mind off to the rest of the pack, Chase was there.

He wasn’t strong the way Devon was, or as brash and fearless as Lake. He didn’t understand me—or my priorities—the way someone with alpha instincts would have, and if it hadn’t been for me, he would have left our little pack long ago—but Chase excelled at being there. Physically, emotionally, he was there and he was steady, and I didn’t question, even for a
second, that he’d love me just the same no matter what I said or did or felt or didn’t feel.

Sitting very still, I closed my eyes and waited. Waited until Chase’s presence wasn’t just a shadow over my mind. Waited until I could feel his breath on my face, until I could smell him, cedar and cinnamon and
home
.

I opened my eyes. There he was, inches away from me, close enough to touch. The constant hum of the shower faded into the background. I let go of the barriers in my mind. In an instant, everything that had happened passed from my mind to Chase’s. My hands found their way to the sides of his face. My palms were warm with the heat of his skin, and I concentrated on that—on feeling him, touching him—and not thinking about what tomorrow might bring.

“Shay’s going to call?” Chase asked, leaning into my touch.

I nodded. “Callum said we’ll have a few hours after the call comes in before we’ll need to leave. Sora will be joining him at the edge of Snake Bend territory. I’ll be taking Dev.”

Chase didn’t stiffen, didn’t react in any way, but I could feel in the pit of my stomach that he hated not being the one to go with me. He had no desire to fight Devon for dominance; he would never treat me as if I were some kind of prize to be won, but Chase didn’t like the idea of my walking headlong into danger without him.

He didn’t like knowing that there were times when he couldn’t have my back.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, and somehow, saying the words to Chase made them feel true. “I can do this.”

A rueful half smile cut across the boyish features of his face. “Of course you can.”

He pressed his lips into my palm, and I heard the rest of his words in my mind, felt them in the surface of my skin.

But if you don’t
want
to
, he continued silently.

Chase would never understand that what I wanted didn’t matter. Not to me, not the way it would to any other girl.

I’d
wanted
to help Lucas.…

There was no room for emotion in my decision-making process. No wanting, no feeling, no anger, no grief.

“Okay,” Chase said softly, murmuring the words into my hair. “Okay, Bryn.”

He wasn’t pushing, wasn’t asking me to change, but I knew he wanted me to have choices that I would never have. I couldn’t blame him for that—not when he was willing to give up
his
choices for me.

But it would have been nice, really nice, if being together hadn’t required that kind of sacrifice. If neither of us had known, in skin and bones and blood-deep certainty, that I would always come first for Chase, and the pack would always come first for me.

“Love you,” Chase whispered, and my lips found their way to his. I rose up on my knees and drove my fingers through his hair. I pulled his head closer, echoing his whisper. Kissing
him. Loving him. Heat played on the surface of my skin and the bond between us flared until I could feel it as a physical thing.

Tomorrow, Shay would call a meeting of the Senate.

Tomorrow, I would leave.

Tomorrow, my emotions would go back in their box. I would strategize. I would stay strong in front of the rest of the alphas. I would win.

But today—today wasn’t tomorrow. And for this instant, this second, I could be a girl, just kissing a boy.

I could feel.

CHAPTER FIVE

“R
ISE AND SHINE
.”

The voice that woke me the next morning was low and gruff—and male.

A man. In my bedroom. Unannounced
.

My eyes flew open. My hand went for the knife I kept on my nightstand. Jed caught my wrist halfway there.

“What do you feel?” he asked me.

If he hadn’t been well over sixty, I would have shown him exactly how I felt. This was my space
—mine
—and my alpha instincts weren’t inclined to take any intrusion lying down. At the same time, there was another part of me that had reacted to his unexpected wake-up call—the Bryn who had grown up around werewolves, the Bryn who knew that most Weres were male, that they were bigger than humans and stronger than humans and fast enough to catch me if I ran.

I was an alpha now, but some lessons were hard to unlearn.

“Pissed,” I said finally, locking eyes with Jed. “I feel
pissed
.”

“What else?” Jed asked, but he must have seen some hint
of danger in my expression, because he dropped my wrist and took a step back.

“More pissed?” I suggested.

“Before you were fully awake, before you processed who I was or what I was doing here, before you remembered who
you
were and what you’re capable of”—Jed kept walking backward, but his voice never wavered—“what did you feel?”

I hated that he was asking me to think about this, hated that even for a moment, even half-asleep, I’d felt …

Fear
.

I could tell, just by looking at Jed, that he was waiting for me to say the word out loud. He’d be waiting a very long time. Even if I hadn’t been alpha, even if there hadn’t been an entire pack of people counting on me to be strong, I never would have admitted to that kind of weakness.

Fear was something you squashed, something you pushed down and hid and glossed over, because fear was like catnip to werewolves. They could smell it. They could taste it. It whetted their appetite for more—more fear, more of you.

In short: not good.

When I was a kid, Callum taught me how to hide my fear. But not feeling it? That was something I taught myself.

“You ever notice, right before you flash out, that the room gets really small?” The rhetorical question seemed harmless enough, but Jed wasn’t done yet. “Maybe you start to feel trapped. A trickle of sweat builds on the back of your neck.
Your heart starts pounding faster, your mouth goes dry. What exactly would you call that, Bryn?”

“Adrenaline,” I replied.

Jed raised a brow.

“Panic.” I grudgingly let go of that word, because being anxious or frantic wasn’t the same thing as being scared. You could panic that you were going to sleep through your alarm or miss your flight or get caught making out with your boyfriend on the bathroom floor.

You could panic about a lot of things, and it didn’t taste like …

“Fear.” Jed said the word. I wondered if he expected me to flinch, but I didn’t. I didn’t even blink.

“Claustrophobia. Anxiety. Desperation,” I countered.

Jed did not seem impressed with my vocabulary. “Fear,” he said again, uncompromising. Certain.

Despite myself, I thought of the way I’d felt in the forest the day before, running and running and working myself into a frenzy. I’d run like something was chasing me. I’d told myself I would die if I stopped.

But had I ever really been
scared
?

Jed smiled. With the scars on his face, it looked more like a grimace, but his eyes were twinkling. “Downright ironic, isn’t it?” he asked me.

“What?” I asked, though I had a sinking suspicion what he was going to say next.

“It’s ironic,” Jed said again, “that if you want to be stronger,
the first thing you’re going to have to learn is how to let yourself be weak.”