I couldn’t do that any more than I could have stripped Lake of her weapons or demanded that Chase open up at the next run and tell the entire pack his human life story.

“The boy is part of the Snake Bend Pack. His alpha has been abusing him, and he came here hoping we could help.” Hoping I could help, I corrected myself silently. “He wants to transfer packs, but Senate law says I need his alpha’s permission first.”

Maddy absorbed this information in an instant, and something dark and animal settled over her gray eyes. When she spoke, her voice was absolutely calm, but there was something almost regal about it.

Something deadly.

“His alpha won’t give permission,” she said softly. “He’ll be furious that the boy got away, that he came here. He won’t like being outsmarted. Monsters like that don’t like knowing there’s a part of people that you can’t touch unless they let you.” Maddy shrugged, like her words weren’t important, like she wasn’t talking about herself every bit as much as she was talking about Lucas. “If you send this boy back, his alpha will kill him.”

I wanted to tell Maddy that she was wrong, that Shay wouldn’t kill Lucas, that Pack Law wouldn’t allow it.

Unfortunately, it did, and Shay would, and I knew, just looking at Maddy, that she wouldn’t understand how I could ever let that happen.

I couldn’t.

If things had gone differently, I might have grown up in Maddy’s place, attacked and raised by a killer who stripped away everything that made me a person, everything that made me me. The others knew me better and had known me longer, but Maddy and I were the most alike, the two of us separated only by winds of chance that had blown her one way and me the other.

I couldn’t let Shay kill Lucas.

If I didn’t do something to save this battered foreign boy, Maddy would never forgive me, and I would never, ever forgive myself.

Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

The thrum of the bond at the gateway of my mind was a constant, incessant reminder that being alpha meant making tough decisions. It meant protecting my pack to the detriment of anything and everything else. I knew that. I accepted it, but I was human, too, and I hadn’t grown up under Callum’s tutelage for nothing.

There was always a way around orders, a way to be the exception instead of the rule. I just needed to find it. I was going to find it.

Even if it killed me.

Chase arched one eyebrow at me, and Devon narrowed his eyes slightly. “Let the record show that I don’t trust the expression on your face right now. I know that expression, Bronwyn.”

Lake smiled beatifically, ready and willing to misbehave. “So do I.”

When it came to the ins and outs of werewolf politics, my resources were severely limited. Of the members of our pack, fourteen had been the taught the ways of the world by a Rabid, two were infants, two had spent their lives as peripherals, one had been a werewolf for less than a year, and the remaining three were Devon, Ali, and me.

Long story short: it wasn’t like I had a werewolf Yoda to show me the ropes. My best bet in our pack was probably Mitch, and if he had information he wanted to share, he would have already given it to me. Ali probably knew more about werewolves than any human on the planet, but somehow, I didn’t think approaching my legal guardian and saying, “Hey, I need to find a loophole so I can steal another alpha’s werewolf and give him even more reason to want me dead,” would go over terribly well.

That left me with exactly two options: Google and Callum. Since I didn’t think a random internet search was going to reveal even a fraction of what I needed to know, I went back to the cabin I shared with Ali and the twins, and sequestered myself in my bedroom to make a call.

Convincing myself to dial the number was harder than it should have been. The part of me that was alpha objected to the idea of bringing another pack into this, and the part of me that had once considered Callum like family balked at the idea of hearing his voice.

There were things—more of them than I wanted to admit—that were easier to forget when Callum stayed in his territory and I stayed in mine.

Flopping down on my bed, I reached for my nightstand and picked up the carving he’d sent me. I still had no idea what it was supposed to mean, but I was positive that it did mean something, and that if and when I called Callum, nothing I had to say would surprise him in the least.

I’d spent my entire life growing up under Callum’s watch without realizing that he had a psychic knack. Sometimes it felt like everyone but me had known that Callum saw flashes of the future and made a routine practice of nudging it in one direction or another. He was fallible. He wasn’t omniscient—but he’d probably known that I was going to call him before the option had even occurred to me, and if I chickened out, he’d probably know that, too.

Screw that.

My fingers were dialing before my mind had processed the decision to do so, and my breath caught in my throat with the first ring. I pictured Callum’s house and saw the landline ringing over and over again.

Maybe I should have called his cell.

The moment that thought crossed my mind, someone picked up the phone, and a smooth, even voice said hello.

Not Callum’s.

The voice was female, and even if I hadn’t recognized it, the process of elimination would have told me that it was Sora—the only female Were in Callum’s pack now that Katie and Lake were in mine. Unfortunately, Sora was also Devon’s mother, which meant that she was Shay’s mother. I was going to go out on a limb and guess she probably wasn’t the best person to ask about how to legally steal a wolf out from under the monstrous product of her loins.

Ew. I so did not want to be thinking about Devon’s mother’s loins.

“Hello?” Sora repeated for what was probably the third or fourth time.

“It’s me.” I’d spent as much time at Devon’s house as my own growing up, so I took it for granted that Sora would know who the me in question was.

“Bryn.” There was a faint trace of a smile in Sora’s voice, and I pulled my knees tight to my chest, surprised at how short a mental hop it was from hearing her say my name to thinking about the last time I’d seen her.

I could almost hear my ribs popping, feel my mouth bleeding as she came at me again and again.

I tried to force myself out of the memory. When I’d broken faith with Callum’s pack and he’d ordered me beaten, Sora was the one who had carried out the sentence. I knew now that the entire ordeal had been part of a larger plan, one that had led me to the founding of the Cedar Ridge Pack, but that didn’t make me hate Sora for it any less.

“Did you want something, Bryn?” Sora’s voice was unbothered and calm, and I wondered if she’d thought, even for a second, about asking me about Devon.

“I need to talk to Callum,” I replied tersely. “Is he around?”

“He’s otherwise occupied at the moment.”

I recognized the half-truth for what it was. For all I knew, Callum was “otherwise occupied” with watching Sora talk to me.

“You might as well just say he doesn’t want to talk to me,” I said dryly. “It’s not going to hurt my tender feelings. This is business.”

Sora snorted. “Some of us have manners.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “and some of us are alphas, so if the Stone River big guy can’t spare the time to talk to the head of Cedar Ridge, just say so.”

The silence on the other end of the line was deafening. I counted to ten in my head and wondered if Sora was doing the same.

“The Stone River alpha can’t officially advise the Cedar Ridge alpha on matters of inter-pack relations,” she said finally, her words clipped and precise. “Were the Stone River alpha to do so, the remainder of the Senate might interpret that as evidence of a political alliance and might therefore feel compelled to make alliances of their own. The Stone River alpha would prefer to avoid such complications.”

I huffed and blew a strand of hair out of my face. “In other words, Callum can’t help me.”

“Officially.”

I translated Sora’s reply to mean that Callum could and would help me unofficially. The trick would be figuring out how exactly a thing like that might work.