Chapter 18: The Alpha's Choice

Bryn's POV

My wolf hit my father at a dead run.

I felt the stone floor under my paws and the heat of his breath.

I felt the bone of his broken wrist against my jaw.

He had no command left.

It had gone out of him when I stopped kneeling.

What stood in front of me was a bleeding man of fifty-three, with a pack watching him fall.

I knocked him down and put my forepaws on his chest.

He looked up at me, and for the first time in my life he was afraid.

Everything I had ever wanted to do to him came up in my throat at once.

I opened my jaws over his throat.

The pack made a sound, a single long breath.

I held it there, with his pulse hammering against my teeth, until my own heart slowed.

Then I let go and shifted back, and knelt over him naked with my bleeding ear and my hands on the flagstones.

"I could do it," I said, loud enough for the stairs to hear. "You all saw. I could end you, and nobody here would stop me."

He did not answer.

"I won't, because I'm not you."

I stood up.

I did not feel victory.

I felt a cold, aching emptiness in the place where my father had been, and the pack watching to see what I would put there.

"Somebody get the healer," I said. "Now."

The old healer's apprentice, who had been staring at the floor all morning, broke from the crowd and ran for the stairs.

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