There was something about the expression on his face that made me suspicious, made me wonder if it was starting already. If he knew something that I didn’t.

“It’s not going to come down to the safety of my pack versus the safety of yours, is it?” I asked. “At least not immediately. There’ll be other threats. Outside threats. The other alphas, maybe. Or something worse.” I paused. He said nothing, and I knew without asking that I couldn’t push my way back into his head no matter how hard I tried.

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

“The future’s always changing, Bryn.” That was it. That was all he gave me. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. He was an alpha. So was I. Things were different. I couldn’t just bait him into giving me an answer.

I’d have to wait it out.

“You really are the most impossible man I’ve ever met,” I told him. He flopped down beside me on the grass and brushed his grizzly cheek against mine. “And you are, without question, the most troublesome and irksome child I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing.”

Callum and I had been family once. We bore each other’s Marks still. I savored this moment, because deep down, I knew that I wasn’t a little girl anymore, that I wasn’t his anything anymore, and that for as long as I was alpha of my pack and he was alpha of his, we would never just be Callum and Bryn again.

Mine.

Mine.

Mine.

I belonged to my own pack now, and they belonged to me—Devon and Lake and Chase, Maddy and Lily and the rest of the Resilients, most of whom weren’t even into their teens. A random and rather twisted thought occurred to me, and I smiled.

“What are you smiling about, Bronwyn Alessia?”

I shrugged. “It’s just that I was raised by wolves, and now in a twisted way, with all the kids around here, I’m raising them. Ironic, huh?”

Callum snorted. “Bryn, m’dear, if there’s any justice in this world, they’ll be nothing but trouble.”

I groaned. Knowing my luck—and theirs—they probably would.