Katie and Alex.
Up until now, I’d been dazed and stressing. Now, I was panicked. “They won’t let you take the twins. The pack, they’ll never let Katie go. You’ve seen the way they—”
“Oh, rest assured, I’m dealing with the pack.” The tone in Ali’s voice left very little doubt in my mind that when she said “the pack,” she meant “Callum.”
Callum, who’d given me to her in the first place.
Callum, who’d ordered my punishment.
Callum, who hadn’t looked at me or said a word to me since I’d touched Chase.
“It’s not Callum’s fault,” I said, wanting desperately to believe it. “Ali, he took care with me. He gave me the only chance that he—”
“I am not having this conversation with you, Bryn. I’m just not. I can’t.” She ran a hand through her hair, and for a moment, she looked very young. “The fact that you don’t hate him for this breaks my heart. And if we weren’t leaving because of what they’d done to you, we’d be leaving because the pack has twisted you enough to make you think that it’s okay for someone to treat you that way. It’s not, and we are. Leaving.”
There was no arguing with her. I would have had better luck convincing Devon to don knockoffs.
With gentle hands, Ali took hold of my waist, careful of my tender body, and she pulled me close, burying her face in my hair. Her shoulders shook, and I realized that she was crying. Sobbing. Clinging to me in a way that made me think she’d never let me go.
“You didn’t wake up,” she said. “I waited, Bryn, and I waited, but you didn’t wake up.”
“I didn’t mean to,” I whispered. I didn’t mean to do any of this. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.
This was my fault. Mine.
Without warning, Ali let go of me and straightened back up. She wiped the tears off her own face and then off mine with the same gentle, brisk motion, and then she walked over to my bookshelf, picked up the box there, and turned to leave.
“Be ready to go in an hour.”
An hour. How could a person get ready to leave their entire life behind in one hour? I sat back down on my bed, not even caring about the way my bruises protested and the pain radiated outward from them like liquid spilling over the edges of a pool.
Devon. I had to call Devon.
And Chase.
Chase.
All of a sudden, the air around me felt very warm and the room felt very small. My breath caught in my throat and my stomach dropped, like someone had unlatched a trapdoor in my intestines.
If Ali followed through with this, if we left, I’d lose him.
Bryn?
His voice in my head calmed me, even as my rational self blathered on that the last thing I should have been worrying about when my entire life was being ripped out from underneath me was a boy I’d seen exactly twice.
I’m here, I replied silently. I’m awake. And Ali’s going to take me away.
Chase didn’t reply immediately, and for a moment, I was terrified that he had gone. But then, slowly, images began to make their way from his consciousness to mine. They danced at the edges of my mind, and like a butterfly, every time I tried to latch on to one, it flew away.
He took it away.
My mouth set in a firm line, I pictured the bond between us and pulled. Growing up, I’d never been a match in strength for the other kids in the pack, but I could hold my own at tug-of-war based on the fact that I never let go. Once I got a grip on that rope, if someone wanted to get it back from me, they would have had to pry it out of my limp, dead arms. Even once they’d pulled me across the line, I didn’t stop fighting.
Chase never stood a chance.
The images flashed into my mind, and I managed to hold on to them long enough for a concrete picture to form in my brain.
Bars.
Steel.
Cage, I realized. They’d caged him. My lip curled upward with fury. Didn’t they realize how awful it was, to be trapped there? I could feel him pacing back and forth.
He wanted out.
I won’t let them do this to you. I’ll—
Nothing, he said back. If I can get out, I will.
A long pause.
They’ll let me out when you’re gone.
Understanding washed over me, and relief. They weren’t punishing him. He wasn’t trapped because he’d disobeyed. He was there because I was leaving, and for whatever reason, they didn’t want him trying to stop me.
Another vague image, a half-completed thought he didn’t want me to hear—
“Ali.” I said her name out loud, and things became very, very clear. Ali had asked them to cage Chase, and they’d agreed. If I’d been in my right mind, I might have wondered what exactly Ali had been forced to sacrifice to get them to grant her request—not to mention permission to leave—in return. But I was too angry to think about anything other than the fact that despite Ali’s ranting and raving about the way the pack had treated me, they were treating Chase like an animal on her bequest.
I couldn’t let her do this. I wouldn’t. In fact, I wouldn’t let her do any of this. I wouldn’t leave. I wouldn’t step foot in that car, and she couldn’t make me. It was going to be a cold day in July before I let her do this to me. To him.
To herself and to Casey. To the twins.
She wasn’t doing this.
End of story. Finit.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I’D TELL YOU THAT YOU CAN’T STAY MAD AT ME forever, but I have a feeling you’d take that as a challenge.”
Exactly two hours after I’d sworn that Ali would drag me kicking and screaming to the car over my own dead body, I was sitting shotgun, alive and not bloody in the least. I’d been giving her the silent treatment for the past hundred miles—not that it was doing any good.
Part of me understood why she was doing this. If Ali hadn’t been so icily furious on my behalf, I might have hated the pack—and Callum—but if was a luxury for another time. Right now, I could handle being mad at Ali, but I wasn’t sure I could handle anything else, and I wasn’t going to risk the dense vortex of emotions in my gut working their way to the surface. I was not about to break down. Not in this car, not once we got to Montana, not ever.
“You would be doing the same thing,” Ali told me. “If something happened to me, if you were in charge of Katie, and if the pack had attacked her—whatever the reason—you would do the exact same thing.”
“Shut. Up.” I broke my silence.
“I’m doing this, I’m not sorry I’m doing this, and I’m not going to undo it,” Ali said. “Live with it, kiddo.”
“You didn’t even ask me what I wanted,” I shot back. “What happened—it happened to me.” It was bad enough that Callum had taken it upon himself to decide what I could and could not handle knowing with respect to The-Night-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. I wasn’t about to let Ali take this away from me, too. “I’m the one they hurt. I’m the one who bled, I’m the one whose body is so bruised that I might as well start answering to the name ‘Patches,’ and I’m the one who had to watch Callum—”
I broke off. Didn’t want to go there.
“Watch him what?” Ali said evenly.
“Nothing,” I said through clenched teeth. “He did what he could.”
I knew it was wrong to be mad at Ali for trying to protect me, but not Callum for hurting me in the first place. I just didn’t care.
“Do you honestly think that Callum didn’t know what would happen, Bryn? From the moment he left you alone with Chase?” She stared out at the road before us, and I leaned forward and flipped on the radio, hoping to drown out her words.
Her face tightened and then her hand lashed out. My arm, like a creature possessed, jerked upward, throwing up a block to protect my face before my conscious mind had time to realize that all Ali was doing was turning the radio back off.
Unsettled, I lowered my arm and hugged it tight to my chest, feeling small and stupid and laid painfully bare.
If Ali noticed my reaction, she at least had the decency not to call me on it. Instead, she pressed on with the current topic: Callum, justice, and me.