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

“RISE 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.”

Half an hour later, I was sitting in the dirt outside the cabin Jed shared with Caroline, awaiting instructions he seemed in no particular hurry to give. Oblivious to—or ignoring—my impatience, Jed took a seat on the ground beside me and reclined back on the heels of his hands.

“My way,” he reminded me.

“Your way,” I repeated. I wasn’t overjoyed with the prospect of more dirt sitting—or with the way he’d woken me up that morning—but I would have made a deal with the devil himself to find a way to control the power inside me, to make it something more than a defense mechanism.

Someday, waiting for the other guy to attack might get me killed.

“You know how to get there,” Jed said finally, breaking what felt like a small eternity of silence. “Deep down, you know. You just ain’t admitted it to yourself yet.”

He wasn’t talking about pain or panic or running like someone was on your heels. The kind of trigger Jed was talking about was something I wanted no part of.

Something I’d spent my entire life training myself not to do.

“Think of the worst thing that ever happened to you,” Jed told me. “Think of a time when you were cornered and trapped and terrified.”

Was that really what it took to summon up my Resilience, to fall into that state where nothing mattered but surviving and protecting the people I loved?

Where I was a faster, better Bryn?

“Every bad thing that’s ever happened to you.” Jed was implacable. “Every moment of terror, every loss, every time you had no power, and someone else had it all. One by one by one, Bryn. That’s the way.”

I’d said I would do anything for my pack. I’d said I would do this Jed’s way. So I did.

I started with recent memories, moments I spent all of my time trying to forget.

The look in Lucas’s eyes—hungry and desperate and dark—when he’d challenged my right to rule. The knowledge that had flooded my body in that instant, that a Were—any Were—was physically capable of killing me dead.

Dread built up inside of me, like bile rising in my throat, but I pressed on and thought of another heart-in-throat moment: seeing Devon lying still on the ground, blood pouring from a bullet wound in his heart. I thought of Lake missing a shot in a fateful game of pool and pretending that she wasn’t terrified that losing might mean spending the rest of her life as the property of Shay.