Trial by Fire (Raised by Wolves #2)(57)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I tried to process the fact that he was even asking, that from his perspective, in his mind, that was even okay.

“You’d choose the pack,” Chase said. He moved his hand from my arm to my chin, angling my eyes gently toward him. “I know that, Bryn. I’m okay with it, and I will never ask you to choose.”

I searched his eyes, wishing that I could smell the truth on him, the way he could on me.

“If it ever comes down to a choice between me and the pack, I want you to choose them. Don’t think about it, don’t second-guess it, don’t feel guilty after the fact. I know you, Bryn. I know you, and I am not asking you to change.” His lips curved upward in a slow, sad smile, and I thought about what Callum had said about being alpha—it was lonely, it was impossible, it was all-consuming.

Chase brushed a strand of hair out of my face. “But at the end of the day, Bryn, if I had to choose between you and the pack, I would choose you—every single time, no questions asked. You need to know that, because that’s who I am, and it’s not going to change. Not now, not ever. For me, it will always, always be you, even if deep down, you wish I could be something or someone else.”

Standing there, looking at Chase and listening to him say something I hadn’t even allowed myself to think, I knew objectively that I wasn’t being fair. That I couldn’t expect the pack to matter to him the way it did to me. That he had accepted what I was, even though it meant that he would never be my number-one priority, the way I was his.

I knew it wasn’t fair to him to expect more than that, but with everything that had happened in the past few days—with everything that was on the verge of happening even now—I couldn’t convince myself that mattered.

I would always choose the pack. Chase would always choose me—and I wasn’t sure I could accept that, fair or not.

Unable to think, to breathe, I brushed my lips lightly over his, pretending for a moment that the two of us were the only people in the world, and then I turned and ran for the Wayfarer, where we weren’t.

“Are you actually asking me to let you go out there and fight the coven alone?” Dev’s voice was surprisingly pleasant. He shifted his gaze from me to Chase, who’d followed on my heels, and raised his eyebrows in a look meant to convey that I was crazy.

Ignoring said look, I tried to stay focused on the task at hand. “The coven is working for Shay. Shay wants our females, so he set the coven up to take me out of the picture without irreparably damaging the girls. Once I’m gone, you’re next in line for alpha, Dev. Think about it. Shay would have taken you in exchange for Lucas—is he really that sentimental, or do you think he just wanted you out of the way?”

“Touché,” Devon said. His mother had beaten me unconscious at Callum’s command. His brother had tortured a wolf under his care. The Macalisters weren’t really a family known for their sentimentality.

“Dev, if you stay and the coven kills both of us, Shay will sweep in and pick the females off one by one. Is that what you want for Lake? For Maddy? For Katie and Lily and—”

“Enough.” Devon held up one palm in a gesture that looked so choreographed, I almost smiled. “You’ve convinced me that only one of us can fight.”

“So you’ll take Ali and the kids and hunker down somewhere safe until the threat has passed?”

Dev snorted. “Not for all the tea in China. Not for front-row seats at Fashion Week. Not for a featured role on Glee.”

I snorted right back at him. “Tell me how you really feel, Dev.”

“You’re the alpha. That means that you have to come first. And like it or not, you’re human, and that means you’re—”

“Breakable?” I suggested, the word Shay had used dripping sarcastically from my own lips. “I’m also Resilient. What happens when Valerie starts messing with your emotions? Or when Bridget whistles a little ditty that turns you from teen wolf into a sitting duck? Lucas said one of the psychics can control wolves. What happens if you can’t fight her off?”

Devon’s jaw snapped shut, and for once, he was absolutely silent. I waited, my eyes locked on his, his locked on mine, and after a long moment, he nodded. He wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t admit that there was even the smallest possibility that I was right, but he would take the younger kids and go, because I’d asked.

He would do what had to be done, even if it killed him. Even if it killed me.

He’d do it for the pack.

“Well, this is nice and cozy.”

If the circumstances had been different, it might have been gratifying to see the way the boys jumped then, given that I’d spent most of my life with werewolves sneaking up on me, but the person who’d gotten the drop on them was standing with her back against the opposite wall, a gun in her hand, blonde hair concealing the left half of her face.

“Caroline.”

She shrugged, like my saying her name was an accusation—one to which she was completely indifferent.

“Did you come here to warn us?” Devon asked, putting melodramatic emphasis on the word. Swooping in to issue her mother’s ultimatums was more or less Caroline’s MO.

“I don’t know why I came here,” Caroline said, looking down at the gun. “But if you want to take it as a warning, that works. My mother won’t be able to hold the others back much longer.”

“Hold them back,” I repeated. “Yeah. Right.”

“You couldn’t make it easy,” Caroline said, ignoring my sarcasm. “You couldn’t just give us that thing and walk away.”

“That thing as in Chase?” I asked, following her gaze to my left, where Chase was eyeing Caroline with detached objectivity, even as his lupine nature became more apparent in his posture, his expression, the feel of his mind.

“Or that thing as in Lucas?” I continued. “Maybe you’d like my baby sister? She’s not quite a year old yet, but she’s a holy horror when she doesn’t get her way.”

“You’re like them,” Caroline told me, her pupils beginning to bleed outward as she stepped away from the shadows. “You’re just like them.”

“No,” I said, aware that Chase was close—very close—to Shifting. “They’re just like you. Did you know they used to be human—Chase and Maddy and the rest? They were human, just like you. They were attacked, just like you. They survived. For that matter, so did I.” I thought about what Jed had said about the man who’d led the coven before Valerie. “My parents didn’t.”