CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FOUR

Once back at the bear camp, the plan is for Barrett to “toss” me back into the prison trailer, shouting at me for being “useless.” That way, he thinks, I’ll be able to rejoin the prisoners as one of their friends, and talk about the ancestral cave’s location with Jasper and Zach.

It would be a stupid plan if it was real. There’s no way that wolf shifters would just welcome back someone who had abandoned them like that, let alone let slip important information around them.

But Barrett doesn’t seem like the sharpest fang on the jawbone, so to speak, and since I’ve presented myself as a helpless, lost, weak little girl, he isn’t paying much attention to my machinations.

He does, annoyingly, seem to take a bit too much pleasure in tossing me back into the trailer. I fall on the ground, skinning my knees and collapsing on the hard metal of the floor.

“Ayala!”

Jasper is by my side as soon as the door shuts behind Barrett. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I mumble