The email was time-stamped. The clock was ticking.
“Am I coming to retrieve my wolf, or am I coming to play you for him?”
I wasn’t sure of the answer to that question, so I responded by hanging up the phone. If Shay was as close to the border as he’d claimed, he’d be here in a little over an hour, and I needed time to assess the situation.
To decide.
What do you expect me to do? I knew things were dire when I started having pretend conversations with Callum in my head. You sent that email. I did what you wanted me to do, what you would have done. What now?
There was no answer—not from pretend Callum, and not from anyone else. As I sat there, the countdown already under way, I was sure of only one thing.
If Shay and I wagered anything—and that was a big if—it would be on my terms. Not his.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I STOOD WITH MY BACK AGAINST THE POOL TABLE, one ankle crossed in front of the other, waiting. The restaurant was eerily quiet, and as I felt Shay drawing nearer, twin urges—one to shudder and one to growl—fought for dominance in my mind. All around me, my backup seemed to be fighting the same battle, but they faded into the woodwork, letting me take the lead.
Before we could fight as a team, I had to meet Shay one-on-one, alpha to alpha.
Foreign. Wolf.
Threat.
I was familiar enough with Shay’s type to know that he wanted me to feel him coming. He wanted me to feel his presence washing over my body like thick, syrupy oil. He wanted me to shudder, to growl, to make one wrong move after another after another.
Shay wanted the advantage. Considering that we were on my land, surrounded by my wolves, that wasn’t going to happen. Shay could puff up his chest and leak pheromones until the cows came home, and I still wasn’t going to respond like he was a threat—even though all my instincts were telling me that he was. I wouldn’t let him get a rise out of me, wouldn’t let him see me scared. No shuddering. No growling. As the door to the Wayfarer opened, I didn’t bat an eye. I didn’t straighten to my full height. I just stayed there, leaning against the pool table, using the knife in my right hand to clean the fingernails on my left.
“You look well.”
Judging by Shay’s words, you would have thought the two of us were old friends, but I suspected that he meant them more as a complaint than anything else. For a fragile little human lotus blossom, I had an annoying habit of coming out of things unscathed. Shay probably would have preferred to see me in pieces.
Glancing down at my fingernails, I took my time responding to his greeting. “It took you an hour and fifteen minutes to get here. Presumably, it will take you an hour and fifteen minutes to go back where you came from, which means that the permission I granted you to be here expires in half an hour.”
I wasn’t going to let him get a rise out of me, but I didn’t have to sit there and exchange niceties, either.
“Very well,” Shay replied, strolling through the room like he owned the place. “This shouldn’t take long.”
I ran my fingertips over the worn felt of the pool table and met his eyes as if they held no more significance to me than a speck on the wind. He returned my stare, his face as blank as mine.
Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.
The familiar call of my pack took on a different tone in my head. I was alpha, Shay was alpha, and there was a subtle suggestion in the air all around us, a whisper in my ear, telling me that there was only ever meant to be one. Werewolves weren’t meant for politics. Shay and I weren’t meant to be exchanging words.
“I appreciate your hospitality.”
My only clue that Shay was feeling the undercurrent, same as I was, was the way that even as he was coating his words with sugar, his chest rose and fell at a quicker pace. It was all too easy to imagine him in wolf form, breathing jaggedly over my corpse.
Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.
Shay brought his gaze to meet mine. I felt him let go of his hold on the instinct to dominate, and I let go of mine.
I imagined my eyes boring twin holes in Shay’s body. I stared at him, and I smiled, because from the moment he’d engaged in this little staring contest, there was a way in which he’d already lost. Every second I held Shay’s gaze, every moment that I was able to stare back at him—the way very few werewolves probably ever had—was an insult.
I was human. I was a girl, and I was mocking him.
“How do you like that?” Devon said.
Shay turned toward the sound of his brother’s voice, and a rush of adrenaline flooded my body like water bursting through the holes in a dam.
Shay had looked away first.
Logically, I knew he’d been distracted, but no amount of logic could override the bodily sensation that I’d won something, that I was more. At the very least, I hadn’t lost—and even a draw felt like a win against a werewolf as powerful as Shay.
With a glint in his eyes, Shay took a step toward Devon, each of them a distorted reflection of the other. Dev was a fraction taller. Shay was broader through the shoulders. They had the same cheekbones, the same jaw, but while Devon’s features were in constant flux and motion, Shay’s face had an unnatural stillness to it, like he was incapable of smiling or frowning or displaying real human emotion of any kind.
“How do I like what?” Shay asked in a tone that would have been more appropriate for talking to a toddler. He was wasting his breath. Dev was the only werewolf in existence with a fondness for the Metropolitan Ballet—he’d been immune to all forms of mockery for years.
“Knowing that you looked away first,” Devon clarified with a pointed grin. “How do you like that?”
Shay didn’t answer Devon. Instead, he turned slowly back to me, and though I could sense an animal rage building inside him, his tone never changed.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t reconsider a trade?”
I didn’t catch Shay’s exact meaning until he elaborated.
“You keep the runt. I’ll take my brother.”
Devon? Shay wanted Devon?
I hadn’t been expecting that. To my left, Devon managed to force his features into a mildly bemused expression, but not before I saw the flicker of hunger and violence cross his face.
If I sent Devon with Shay, there was no way things would end without bloodshed. As much as I wanted to believe that Devon could take his brother, I wasn’t sure of it. I had doubts, and I told myself that was the reason I was going to say no.
It had nothing to do with the fact that sending Devon with Shay would mean losing him. It had nothing to do with the way that losing Dev would feel like cutting off a part of my soul.
“No.”
“No trade?” Shay repeated. “Pity. A wager, then? Or should Lucas and I just be on our way?”
He said Lucas’s name in a cold and careless way, and I tried not to think of the bruises, the scars, the haunted eyes too timid to look me straight in mine.
“What kind of wager did you have in mind?” I asked evenly.
Shay met my eyes. “Before we talk wagers, show me the boy. I assume you’re keeping him close by? He’s a bit of a runner and more than a bit of a coward. I’d hate for you to wager something dear only to find out that the prize you were after had drowned himself like a kitten.”
“He’s close,” I said, not wanting to call Lucas out, because I couldn’t trust myself to look at his face the moment he saw Shay and still do what was best for my pack.
“Define ‘close,’” Shay said, his tone demanding an answer I wasn’t willing to give. The silence that stretched between us was charged, and I could feel the need to challenge him rising again.
“Here.” The word came from the vicinity of the kitchen, where I’d told Lucas to wait, but he wasn’t the one who said it. Maddy stalked into the dining room, looking like some kind of Valkyrie come to gather the souls of the dead. There were dark circles under her gray eyes, and her lips were swollen.
Freshly kissed.
“Lucas is here.” Maddy’s voice was quiet, but there was something regal about the set of her chin, and I knew, maybe even before she did, what she was going to say next. “If you let him stay here, I’ll go with you.”
Her words felt like lightning going off in my brain. She knew what she was saying. She knew what it would mean. She wasn’t asking permission.