Page 6

Somebody in that crowd growled. Low, at the back of their throat, and again it wasn't aimed at me.

"You won't even have to lie about it," I pushed on, louder, because forty faces were watching and I needed them on my side. They must see the reason in what I was suggesting. "You never gave me permission to be here in the first place, remember? I hot-wire your cars. I ditch your beta in dressing rooms. I'm a problem, everyone here knows I'm a problem, so let me be somebody else's problem and take your lives back. Please" that last word was choked out through numb lips.

The quiet that followed was tangible. Like walking into a spiderweb in the dark.

Alex crossed the last of the gravel and stopped in front of me. Then he reached out and closed one enormous hand around my upper arm, above the elbow, exactly where Ace had grabbed me twenty minutes earlier. His grip was familiar. Possessive in the way a parent holds a child they'd quite like to shake some sense into. It was the grip you use on something you have absolutely no intention of putting down.

"No," he rumbled.

"Alex…" my rebuttal died in my throat at his look.

"You misunderstand what that paper is." He didn't raise his voice either. He never had to. "You think it's a threat. It isn't. It's a test." His thumb tapped once against my bicep. "They want to know if a pack can be bought. If they can shut a café and empty a school and I will hand them a girl to make it stop. Because if that works on me, it works on every Alpha in this country, forever. There is no price tag on that paper because the price is all of us."

The magic came up in me so sudden and fast I had absolutely no idea what it wanted to do.

"Then let it be a test you pass," I hissed fighting to hold of my panic. "Let go of my arm I can’t control my magic at the moment."

"I said no."

"They are hurting your children, Alex."

"Yes." And that was the moment his voice finally changed tone, dropped, went down somewhere under where his wolf lives. "And do you know what my children asked me at dinner last night? Whether you were coming down to eat, because Jack saved you a roll and wouldn't let anybody touch it. It's still on the counter. It's hard as a brick now."

My eyes burned with unshed tears and I fought to hold them back. I hated it.

"Hazel Byrne." He ducked his head so I couldn't look anywhere but at him while forty people heard every word, which I understand now was the entire point. "You are pack. I told you that in my office with your grandmother's lies still warm in the room. It was true then, and no paper with a wax seal on it changes it now. The last non-shifter called a pack before you came three hundred years ago." His mouth twisted in a mockery of a smile. "I won't hand over my pack. Not for a café. Not for a school. Not to save my own skin, and definitely not because the person in question asks nicely, which for the record is the first time you have ever asked me for anything nicely. Sadly, I notice you did it to get rid of yourself."

"That's not…" It absolutely was.

"Try it," he suggested pleasantly. "Take the truck. See how far up the road you get before they bring you back kicking and screaming."

I looked at forty faces and did not find one that would help me.

Then Amber came out of the house but she did not stop at the porch railing.

She came down the steps with her red corkscrews loose around her shoulders and flour on her forearms to the elbow. She got about six feet into the gravel before the air over her rippled like heat off a road in the middle of summer and there was a wolf standing where she'd been. Slim. Long-legged. Red as a struck match.

The breath I was taking got stuck in my throat.

Every single wolf in that yard dropped their eyes to the gravel.

Not their heads. Not a bow, nothing so formal. Forty pairs of eyes just went to the gravel, all at once, like a wave caressing the shore. Nobody said anything about it. Nobody so much as shuffled.

Except Jack, who came barreling out of the front door in one sock and one bare foot and looked directly at his mother, right in her face, and beamed.

The red wolf crossed the yard, sat down on my foot with her full weight, and leaned her shoulder against my knee.

"That's her vote," Alex explained, and released my arm at last.

I stood there in a fort somebody had built around me, with the blood drying on my palm, my magic humming under my skin, and a boot still clutched in one hand. I understood two things at exactly the same time.

The first was that I was not getting off that land tonight, and that I was so relieved about it, I could have thrown up.

I nodded at Alex because I didn’t trust my voice to say a word.

The second thing I understood was worse.

River hadn't come out of the house.