Page 1 of Untamed

Arlo

Ikilled a man three years ago, and somehow that still isn’t the strangest thing about my life. The stranger part is waking up every morning at Wolfscorge with no bond mark anywhere on me, no Omega scent caught in my clothes, nobody worked so deeply into my instincts that I’d notice them missing before I noticed anything else. My house smells like leather soap, coffee, and me, which stopped seeming strange sometime during the first year.

Then I walk past one of the pack houses with a window cracked open and get hit with all of it at once—sweet Omega, Alpha musk, a Beta somewhere underneath, somebody’s dinner worked into the curtains—and remember most Alphas aren’t supposed to live like this. We grow up with other people’s scents rubbed into everything until pack becomes part of the background, but mine never got the chance to become anything except mine. Three years alone in a house meant for more than one person has made the absence ordinary enough that I usually don’t feel it until somebody else’s life gets in my nose.

Wolfscorge wasn’t supposed to be forever. They had prettier words for it when they brought me in: placement, rehabilitation, review. A lot of paperwork for locking the gates behind me and refusing to say when they might open again. I was supposed to prove I could live around other designations without putting another body on the floor, which was fair enough considering the body. Less fair was nobody ever telling me how long I was supposed to keep proving it, and somewhere along the way I stopped asking because asking only gave them another thing to write down.

“It’s bullshit,” I mutter into my coffee as I step onto the patio. Morning has made the compound look respectable again, all trimmed grass, expensive stone, and paths winding between houses built to make captivity feel suburban. The perimeter wall shows through the trees if I look hard enough, though most mornings I make a point not to. I should be rotting in a maximum-security prison for murder, not drinking decent coffee in an experimental cage somebody decided qualified as rehabilitation, but Wolfscorge has always been good at dressing ugly things in clean language.

The man I killed had been running the bonding trial that destroyed the Omega paired with me, a detail that tends to get flattened beneath the murder charge. The kid’s body was already failing when the bastard ordered another round, then another, while screams became data and neurological damage became something to discuss through glass. I made sure he never got the chance to sign off on another Omega. That part has never kept me awake. It’s everything the Collective did before I put him on the floor, and everything they’ve done since, that keeps shifting under my feet whenever I start thinking I understand the shape of this place.

Wind cuts across the patio and brings half the compound with it. Alpha musk drifts from somewhere near the market, something warm and sweet enough to be an Omega hangs around one of the pack houses, and underneath both are food, damp earth, smoke, and the faint chemical bite around the Main House that never quite disappears. My own scent sits heavier against my skin than most Alphas’, strong enough that people notice when I walk into a room whether I want them to or not, so three years of keeping my mouth shut has done more for my privacy than scent control ever could.

It worked well enough until the bear came through here two weeks ago, several hundred pounds of brown fur came crashing through the aftermath of another pack’s disaster, and every useful instinct I’d spent three years sharpening apparently abandoned me at once. I went after him without stopping long enough to decide whether chasing a drugged grizzly through Wolfscorge was remotely intelligent, helped drag him back when staying out of it would’ve been easier, and knew before anyone explained a damn thing that there was an Omega beneath the pine, earth, blood, and fear. Even half-conscious under all that animal scent, his designation was there, sweet enough to catch somewhere under my ribs and stay there.

I still catch the memory of him when there’s nothing around me except my own house and the trees. It comes back wrong sometimes, not even a full scent so much as pine and blood in the back of my throat, followed by the ugly certainty that handing him over to the guards was a mistake. I should’ve protected him, or at least stayed close enough to know what happened after they took him, and the fact that I keep circling back to that thought is exactly why I shove both hands into my pockets and start toward Kael’s house before I can spend another morning wondering whether Orion woke up alone.

Kael’s pack is the only one here actively digging into what the Collective has done to Wolfscorge, which makes them dangerous people to know and probably explains why I keep ending up at their door. I’m halfway down the path when an older Alpha approaches from the opposite direction, broad shoulders filling out an old jacket and the flat, settled edge of a forced bond clinging to his scent. I know his face and little else, which is about as much as I know about most people here, but his gaze flicks toward Kael’s house before coming back to me.

He tips his chin toward Kael’s place without bothering to hide where he’s looking. “You’re heading over there again?”

“That was the plan.” I keep walking, and he turns enough to fall into step beside me for a few yards, rubbing one hand over the gray taking over his beard while his eyes check the nearest guard post.

“You’ve always been good at staying out of sight. Better than the rest of us.” His voice drops once the post is behind us. “I’d keep doing it if I were you. Kael and Thane have the Council watching every move that pack makes now. Whatever they dug up, whatever happened with that Omega of theirs, it’s trouble.”

The first answer that wants out would probably earn me another review, so I bite it back. Having to answer to something called the Council while an organization called the Collective quietly rearranges people’s lives would almost be funny if mine hadn’t already been one of them. What catches me instead is how little fear comes off the Alpha beside me. He smells resigned more than anything, old and settled enough in it that talking about spending the rest of his life behind the perimeter barely changes his scent.

“So that’s it for you?” I glance over. “You’re just staying here?”

His mouth twists beneath the gray in his beard, not quite a smile and nowhere close to one. “We’re not getting out, Arlo. You know that better than most.”

“Knowing how to stay out of trouble isn’t the same thing as giving in.” The words make something shift in his scent, resignation thinning as he slows near the fork in the path and looks at me properly.

He rubs a thumb over the gray in his beard. “You used to think the same way I do.”

“No. I knew how to keep them from noticing me.” Kael’s house is visible farther ahead, warm light behind the windows and too much noise leaking through the walls already. “There’s a difference.”

He studies me for another moment before his attention slides toward the house again. “Maybe. Just remember that the people they notice tend to disappear.”

I wave him off and keep walking, but the warning follows me anyway. All the attention has been on Kael’s pack because their Omegas were the first known Ferals here to shift into something other than human, which should’ve been impossible and somehow isn’t even the part that bothers me anymore. Impossible stopped meaning much around Wolfscorge once the Collective got involved.

I hear Kael’s house before I reach the porch. Something small thumps against the other side of the door, followed by Preston telling somebody to stop chewing whatever they’ve found, and by the time Malik opens up he has a tiny white fox tucked against his chest like this is a perfectly ordinary way to answer the door. One of four babies the pack ended up with after everything went sideways. The pups shift too, fox one minute and human child the next, and everyone in this house has apparently decided that barely qualifies as strange anymore.

The pup stretches toward me the second I step inside, black nose working at the air as he catches my scent. “Don’t,” I warn him, which only makes Malik laugh and shift the baby out of reach while another fox shoots past us from the living room, claws scrambling over the floor before he disappears under a chair. Milk and fox fur layer through the bonded scents of the full pack until the whole place smells crowded, warm, occupied in a way my house never does, and I hate that I notice the difference before I even make it to the table.

Preston is on the couch with another pup in his lap, fingers moving through tiny ears while Slate sits beside him. Kael and Thane have taken over the dining table with enough papers to make the room look like an investigation instead of somebody’s home, and Preston spots me first, his face going entirely too pleased.

Preston shifts the pup higher on his lap and grins over the top of its ears. “Look who came back. How’s your bear?”

“He’s not my bear.” I take the chair nearest the end of the table, then glance toward Slate when his attention sharpens. “And he was a fucking Omega.”

That kills Preston’s amusement fast enough that even his scent changes, the warmth dropping out of it as he looks past me toward Slate. “Another one?”

“That’s what I smelled. He was drugged out of his mind and covered in enough animal scent to hide almost anything, but the Omega was there underneath it.” Saying it out loud brings the woods back too easily: wet earth, sedatives, blood, then that sweetness buried under the bear.

Kael clears enough papers away to lean both forearms on the table. “We knew the bear was on the list. What we didn’t know was when he’d show up.”

“Or that he’d already be shifting,” Thane says. Slate needed both Alphas’ bonds before the fox fully came through; Orion was already running around Wolfscorge on four paws before I got anywhere near him, which turns every comfortable theory we had about how the Collective was forcing these changes into something less comfortable.