“Yes,” he admitted with reluctance. “There’s a formal ceremony, but it requires Cord’s participation.” A smile more at home on a snake than a wolf slithered across his mouth, and it reinforced how well he was matched to his viper of a mate. “There’s also the small matter of the moon.”

“Let me guess,” I sighed, relief vanishing in a blink. “If he hasn’t shifted back to a man by the next full moon, you’ll have him mauled by rabid chipmunks or drop him in a pit of squirrels with his jaws wired shut and a nut pinned under his tongue.”

The buttery rich sound of Bessemer’s laughter disarmed me. “Nothing so barbaric.”

Clearly he and I had very different ideas of barbarism. I glanced between them. “What then?”

“He’s expelled from the pack,” Imogen said, once it became apparent Bessemer was content to keep me in the dark. “The longer a warg stays in his wolf skin the more animal he becomes until there’s no coming back. Some can last days, some weeks. A few of the more dominant wolves are capable of retaining their humanity for months. Past that…”

“Past that he’s no longer a warg,” Bessemer finished for her. “He’s a wolf, and what use do I have for a pet?”

The sting of claws piercing my skin as they curved over my fingertips anchored me. Smelling the blood welling in my palms, Graeson shifted his gaze to me. This time it was more of an urgent shut it than his earlier and more polite zip it. Clearly Graeson-as-wolf comprehended more of the subtext than I gave him credit for, but I wasn’t backing down from this.

“He’s a dominant warg,” I argued.

“He’s a broken warg.” Bessemer curled his lip. “He sits at your feet, looks to you for guidance, as if you are his master.”

That was the problem in a nutshell, and it might or might not have had something to do with me. Graeson had told me himself he’d been off even before Marie’s death. From my perspective, made stunningly clear by Bessemer’s urgency to expel, kill and/or tame him, the issue wasn’t who he looked to for guidance, but the simple fact that he no longer looked to Bessemer.

Graeson was an alpha in the making. When he returned from the place where his grief had spiraled him, and I had to believe he would, and soon, Bessemer expected retribution. He expected challenge. He expected Graeson to be out for blood. And he was wise to feel Graeson-as-wolf’s breath on his nape, hot and moist and tangy with blood as yet unspilled.

“I am no one’s master, and if Graeson is broken, it’s because you crushed his sanity beneath your boot when you stamped out the pack bond.”