CHAPTER 9 #2
The newcomer grabbed the chair beside mine and sat in it backward, his arms on the top as he faced me.
It put his rippling biceps on display, and I looked him over.
He appeared about my age and was easily one of the most beautiful people I had ever seen.
His thick dark hair had a slight curl to it, his eyes were a striking green, and he had an expressive mouth that seemed on the verge of a smile, paired with cheekbones most models would kill for.
He winked at me. “James.”
“Layla,” I answered. “What will I get used to exactly?”
“The way bombproof rooms make you feel like you’ve been buried alive.”
“Alternatively, I could just take to avoiding them like the plague.”
He chuckled. It was a glorious sound. “Good luck with that. You’re a Kolbeck now. Maybe not in name, but your association with the family put a target on your back the second you set foot in the city. That power and that pretty face will only make it worse for you.”
Was that supposed to be a compliment?
A trim, dark-skinned Black woman in her late thirties with perfectly sculpted brows and enviable bone structure took the chair on the other side of him.
The beads on the ends of her braided hair clicked together as she shook her head, rolling her eyes at his back.
“Don’t let him flirt with you too much. The bond is a bitch early on, and Michael might have to finally do something about his annoying ass. ”
I ignored James in favor of her. “You’re bonded, too?”
“Fifteen years now,” she said. “I’m Monica, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said. Now can you please answer the five hundred questions about the bond that I can’t ask my mother without her turning it into the most uncomfortable conversation of my life? I wanted to add.
“Are we really going to just sit here and pretend we don’t want to fight her?” a compact man in his late twenties asked as he took the seat across from Monica.
His skin was a darker olive than mine, and his head was shaved, which made his thick black eyebrows all the more apparent.
The shirt he wore could have been a twin of my own, both in color and size.
How he’d managed to get it on over all his muscles without ripping it was beyond me.
Scars peppered his exposed skin. Claw marks.
Gunshot wounds. Peeking out from his collar, a still healing vampire bite looked pink and angry.
He wrecked shit for a living and wanted people to know it.
Monica spared him a glance. “Yes, Kevin. We are. Because what your null ass can’t tell is that she’s shielding herself. Which means the power you’re feeling is a trickle of the heat she’s packing.” She turned my way. “You’re MacKenzie Valley, aren’t you?”
I stared at her. Maybe other wolves had wondered about it, but Monica was the first one to ever ask me flat out. It made me instantly respect her. She seemed like a woman who didn’t bullshit.
“I am,” I said.
I had to give it to the others: They handled it better than most. Monica simply nodded. James sucked in a breath and straightened in his chair, all hint of flirtation gone. Kevin, weirdly, leaned forward, a gleam of excitement in his eyes.
“Don’t do it, Kev,” Monica warned. “I met one once. He was in my husband’s former pack. If she’s anything like he was, she can throw you through this wall.”
Ronald turned and pinned her with a look. “The wall is twenty-inch-thick steel-rebar-reinforced concrete.”
“Your point?” Monica asked.
Ronald slowly pivoted his head toward me, brows rising in question.
I shrugged at him. Past my favorite parlor trick in high school—getting tipsy and lifting cars to entertain my friends—I hadn’t really tested the full range of my strength.
Nor did I plan to. I knew through the grapevine that most of my fellow MacKenzie survivors served as enforcers or alphas in other packs.
Their lives were brutal and short. No thank you.
I’d much rather die in bed at the ripe old age of ninety than be cut down because I felt the need to show off.
“Are you really shielding?” Kevin asked me.
“Like a sonofabitch.”
“Stop,” Ronald said, taking a seat next to Kevin. I didn’t miss the way it placed him between us.
“Stop what?” I asked.
“Shielding,” he answered. “This room is warded. We need to know how much your power could surge if you’re pissed off enough or knocked out.”
Michael and Emma took the only open seats remaining, him on my left, with Emma between him and Ronald. Good. If Kevin lost his mind and tried to lunge at me, they could protect her.
Michael shook his head. “It won’t surge if she’s knocked out. She shields even in her sleep.”
Monica leaned forward, expression curious. “Really?”
I nodded.
Ronald was like a dog with a bone. “We still need to know.”
I looked around the room. All eyes were on me. “As long as everyone understands that I am not an alpha. I am not challenging you in any way. Please don’t try to attack me.”
“We have more control than most,” James said. “Right, Kevin?”
Kevin put his hands up and grinned. “Can’t really blame me for being interested, can you? I don’t remember the last time I lost a fight.”
Michael leaned close to me, our shoulders brushing. “You are under no obligation to do this.”
I met his dark eyes for a brief moment. “I know. It’s fine. They’re your people. If you trust them, I trust them.”
“Awww,” Kevin said.
Monica threw a pen at him. “Shut up, turd breath.”
Michael spared them a glance. His face was stern, but the amusement I felt coming off him made it obvious that he cared for these people. “I do trust them, despite the fact that they have a propensity to act like a pack of feral malefactors when they’re together.”
James laid his head down on his forearms and gave Michael a dreamy look. “I love it when you use SAT words.” His expression was probably meant to look cute, but with a face like his, it was closer to panty-melting.
I looked away before I could be caught in its spell.
Ronald was less amused. “Knock it off,” he said, his voice dropping into a warning growl.
The room settled down.
I figured now was as good a time as any and started easing the restraints I’d placed upon my power.
When my parents, with the aid of Audrey, had taught me to control it, they used metaphors.
Audrey said that when learning spells, routines and visualizations could be helpful for young practitioners just beginning to harness their magic.
She saw no reason it would be different for me, so I’d spent years perfecting my very own ritual.
In my mind, there was a cage. It formed a perfect circle around my metaphysical abilities.
The number of bars never changed. That was important.
If they were always there, it would be much easier for me to remember their presence when I was upset or afraid.
Audrey taught me to give them flexibility.
When I drew my power in, I visualized the cage shrinking in my mind.
When I let it out, the cage expanded. Expansion was easy.
Shrinking all those bars down until I could barely detect them?
That was the hard part, even now, after years of practice.
And that was what I’d been doing since I arrived in the city. It would be nice to let them out some.
With a thought, they began to loosen. The tightness in my shoulders eased as I returned the cage to the size I normally kept it at around my own pack.
“You feel like an alpha,” James said. The green of his eyes had an iridescent sheen to them now, his wolf form closer to the surface.
Michael shifted in his seat. “This is just above the level she had it at when I met her.”
“At the bonding ceremony?” Ronald asked.
“Yes,” Michael answered.
Kevin leaned his elbows on the table. “And no one tried to fight you there?”
“The peace of the ritual is sacred,” I said.
He frowned. “Oh, right. I forgot about the sanctity some packs place on that night.”
“Keep going,” Ronald told me.
I closed my eyes and took another deep breath, and as I let it out, the bars of the cage expanded even further.
“Keep going,” Ronald repeated.
I did what he asked, letting the bars loosen so much that power flowed out through the wide gaps between them.
My very existence expanded with the cage.
Smells became stronger, sharper. I picked up the hint of fur just beneath James’s skin, the lingering scent of the shaving cream Ronald had used this morning.
Monica must have had something sweet around lunch, because there was a small drop of honey on her pant leg, hidden by the dark fabric.
Sounds likewise became amplified. Not only could I hear every heartbeat in the room, I also heard the valves that pumped the blood in and out of them. Emma’s stomach rumbled. The fabric of Michael’s suit sliding across itself as he shifted beside me was almost deafening.
Even without the threat of fighting, I would keep my powers caged in, because everything was so overwhelming at this level that I could barely concentrate. No wonder my birth pack had eventually lost control and destroyed itself.
“Stop,” Ronald bit out.
I opened my eyes to see everyone sitting very still in their seats.
Even Emma, a human, appeared supremely uncomfortable, as though the air itself pressed down on her.
To my enhanced eyes, they looked like new people.
All the tiny, minute flaws that marked their skin were apparent.
I could have stared at the various shades of dark blond and light blond in Emma’s hair for days, learning all the new variations of color I found there.
I turned from her to Michael. He looked incredible.
Like Michael, only more. He’d missed a few hairs in his beard with the clippers this morning.
The dark eyes that met mine were slowly bleeding into the lighter color of a wolf’s, and I watched as brown was supplanted with the jeweled tones of topaz, citrine, and amber, ringed by a darker band of onyx.