Chapter 19: Step Back, Let Me

My foot came down one step toward him.

The command went through me and pulled.

I had felt an Alpha's voice before, my father's, a thousand times at the dinner table.

I had never felt one with nothing in me to push back.

My second foot moved.

My head had been empty for a year, and the empty part of me answered him first.

Then the noise came.

It rushed in from every side at once, the same eleven voices that had arrived when I put my hand on the Crown stone.

Somebody was complaining about the shower schedule.

Somebody else was reading out a grocery list.

"Her braid's crooked," Dessa said inside my skull, loud and clear. "Rowe, you're ours. Say it."

"You're not on your own, Rowe," said the big man. "I've got the handbook, and it says no."

"Sell her to the highest bidder," said another voice. "We'd get the bunk back."

"Shut up," said all the others at once.

I laughed, out loud, in front of four hundred wolves, and my foot stopped.

"I answer to the Crown and to no pack," I said.

The command broke against me and fell away.

Alpha Colter staggered back a step.

"It was empty," he said. "She was empty."

"She's never been empty," said my father from the Silver Creek table.

He had risen.

My five brothers stood up behind him, and they were not in a line with their hands at their sides.

Colter's face went dark.

He threw back his head, and his jacket split down the back as he shifted.

He was a heavy brown wolf, deep-chested and quick for his size, and he went for my throat.

I heard Ansel's boots hit the floor.

"Step back," I said, out loud, without turning. "Let me."

I felt him stop.

His voice came into my head, low and rough, and I could hear the grin in it.

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