Our house wasn’t really a single-family dwelling. An Alpha’s house was the center of the pack, designed to be part meetinghouse, part hotel, part hospital. Sometimes it was just Adam, Jesse, and me who lived there, but Joel and his wife currently were living in the suite on the main floor. There were two extra bedrooms on the second floor, and I’d sent Zee to one and Tad to the other. Aiden had been, not ungently, settled in the safe room in the basement and told to make himself at home. The safe room had camera surveillance, and the doors were alarmed and lockable. When the doors were locked, the room would hold an out-of-control werewolf. Aiden had merely smiled at the doors.

“These locks won’t hold me,” he’d told me.

“You’re a guest, not a prisoner,” I said, more worried about Adam, who was in our mini-clinic getting checked out, than whether or not our guest liked his accommodations. “This is the last private room in the house. If you’d rather, you can sleep in the rec room, which is set up as a bunk room, too. But I’ll warn you that there are a number of pack who view those rooms as public property.”

“No,” he said after a moment, as if he was trying to figure out how to react. “This is fine. I was just warning you.”

“You gave your word,” I said. “And we gave ours.”

“Yes,” he agreed. Then he relaxed, as if we’d stepped back into something he knew. “So we did. Twenty-four hours.” He gave me an enigmatic smile that did not belong on the face of a child.

The safe room was next door to the clinic. We both heard the crack of breaking bones. I froze, my stomach clenched. Adam’s control was back in place because I had felt nothing through our link.

Aiden jumped like a startled cat and showed the whites of his eyes.

“Our Alpha’s shoulder healed wrong,” I told him, feeling sick. “They had to rebreak it.”

We both listened to the silence. “Tough man,” he said, finally.

“Oh, yes,” I agreed. “If you’ll excuse me?”

“Of course.”

But Warren stopped me as I headed to the clinic. Before I could say “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” I found myself chopping vegetables while Warren and his very-human partner, Kyle, barbecued hamburgers outside. We were setting up a barbecue dinner because, evidently, in between sadistic-but-necessary medical procedures, Adam had called for a meeting of the pack.

—