Raised by Wolves (Raised by Wolves #1)(31)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Was that what it would always be like for me?

“Five minutes,” our teacher announced from the front of the room, and then, just to clarify the point, he wrote the number 5 in a big loopy scrawl on the chalkboard. On my right, Devon had already started checking his answers. On my left, Jeff of the motorcycle incident had simply given up, opting instead for staring at the sweet, quiet girl who’d dumped him not long after he’d given her my pen.

I stopped writing with forty-five seconds to spare, and even though I didn’t have time to double-check my calculations, I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d aced it. I certainly should have. On late, sleepless nights, the memory of the Big Bad Wolf waiting for me in dreams, there’d been nothing to do but study algebra and think of Chase.

He’d grown up in the foster-care system.

He’d been angry for as long as he could remember.

He appreciated the power of privacy—or had before he’d turned.

He was a living, walking impossibility.

And he was mine.

Pack. Not Pack. Pack. Not Pack.

“Time’s up!”

The teacher sounded way too perky for someone who typically took pleasure in our dismay, but given the fact that his summer vacation started the second that ours did, I didn’t suppose I could blame him. Once upon a time, summer had meant running around barefoot with Devon and a visit from the only female werewolf anywhere near our age. I could feel it in my bones that this summer was going to be different.

I wasn’t ready.

As the teacher came by to collect my exam, I had a single moment of insanity, during which I fought the urge to hold on to my paper. If I didn’t turn in the test, it wasn’t really summer yet.

If it wasn’t summer, I wasn’t going to see Chase again.

And if I didn’t see Chase again, I wouldn’t have to worry about what he might say. What I might find out. What I might remember.

What I might do.

“Ms. Clare?”

The teacher sounded so befuddled that I loosened my grip on the exam and let him have it. Beside me, Devon grinned.

“Did you pass?” he asked, as we gathered our bags and headed for the door.

I didn’t respond.

“Come on, Bryn—my summer plans are just as subject to your state of groundedness as yours are. Did you pass?”

With my luck, Dev’s summer plans probably involved attempting to organize a werewolf theater festival. I shuddered to think of the number of roles I’d have to play when the surplus of males in the pack refused to don curly blonde wigs and play girls in the tradition of the original Shakespearean plays.

“I passed,” I said. “And for the record, I haven’t agreed to any of your so-called plans yet.”

With Devon, things were easy. Besides Ali, he was the only one I could look at without thinking of the rest of the pack.

“You don’t have to go, you know,” Devon said, his voice uncharacteristically understated. “If you decide you don’t want to, if you’d—for instance—rather hitch a ride into Denver and have a night on the town such as only I can show you …”

My look stopped Devon mid-sentence.

“Sorry. It’s just … you smell like him.” Devon said the words lightly, but a muscle in his jaw tensed. “You haven’t seen him in weeks, you didn’t touch him, and you still smell like him.”

That was news to me. Self-consciously, I sniffed at my own arm, and a couple of town girls glanced at me and snickered. They probably thought I was checking myself for BO.

“I don’t smell anything,” I told Devon, ignoring the townies.

Devon didn’t reply—he just twirled his pen around his fingers like a tiny, ink-filled baton. “Come on,” he tried again. “You. Me. Netflix.”

He was every bit as bad as Ali, pulling me back from the edge just before I dove headfirst into the abyss below.

Screw the townies, I thought, and giving them a real show, I butted my head gently against Devon’s chest, and he rested his chin on the top of my skull.

“You know I’m going,” I said, speaking directly into his shoulder.

He sighed, once quietly and once with the melodrama I’d come to expect from him. “Yes. I know. Nobody puts Baby in the corner, et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah.”

The fact that he could attach not one but two “blah”s on the end of a Dirty Dancing quote conveyed the true depths of his sour mood.

“I’ll be fine.”

Devon didn’t reply.

“Chase wouldn’t hurt me.” Even if Chase lost it, even if Callum and the Rabid were duking it out for dominance in his head, if I’d gotten under Chase’s skin half as much as he’d gotten under mine, I’d be fine.

Devon said his next words so quietly that I almost didn’t catch them. “It’s not Chase I’m worried about.”

I tried to make him repeat himself, but he wouldn’t, and that, more than anything, told me that the person Devon was worried about wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Chase.

It was Callum.

“You can’t honestly be worried about that,” I told Dev, but even as the words left my mouth, I sensed his wolf stirring.

Females were to be protected, but the alpha was to be obeyed.

“Callum would never hurt me.” That had been my litany since the moment he’d rescued me from under the sink. Crooned to me. Talked to me. Banished the haze.

“If you break your permissions, he won’t have a choice.”

I jabbed my fist into Devon’s stomach hard enough to knock the air out of a normal boy. He didn’t respond at all.

“I’m not going to break the conditions,” I said. “I didn’t last time. I’m not stupid.”

That statement was met with rather insulting silence.

“I followed instructions last time, didn’t I?”

More silence, and then, finally, Devon broke into a song from Annie.

“‘Hard Knock Life,’” I said. “Seriously?”

Devon shrugged, but I noticed that he didn’t step away from me, like his wolf thought that if they just stayed close enough to me, I’d be okay.

“Trust me, Dev. I’ll be fine.”

My words must have sounded like truth, because he backed off, but in the depths of my brain, I wondered if the future would make a liar out of me. Because the last time I saw Chase, I wasn’t fine. I didn’t break permissions. I didn’t force Callum’s hand.

Chase hadn’t laid a finger on me.