Page 24 of Untamed

Malik scrolls through the files. “The part after the bond. Slate’s records are obsessed with removals and recovery, but yours change language as soon as the finger bite takes. After that they start measuring stabilization, mirroring, Alpha response, territorial escalation, shared regulation. They weren’t only watching whether Orion settled. They were watching what happened to both of you once the bond existed.”

I look at the forms again. “They were tracking both of us.”

“They still are,” Kael says, dropping the folder onto the table and opening it to a stack of guard reports. “The Council requests aren’t only about whether Orion can stay human. They’re tracking your pheromone output, how often you’re within physical reach of each other, what happens when he wakes from nightmares, whether your scent changes when he shifts.”

The first page is broken into times and measured distances. Someone outside our house recorded how long Orion stayed in bear form after an unfamiliar Alpha passed the property, how quickly I came into the room when he woke, which windows were open at the time, and how long he stayed within reach afterward. The next page covers the night of the Feral spike.

Orion leans over the folder with me. His fingertips stop beside one line written in the same dead language the Collective uses for everything: Subject sought direct physical regulation from assigned Alpha. Successful resolution following sexual contact and knotting.

I read it twice because the first time my brain refuses to make the words belong to us. Then I close the folder before Orion has to keep staring at it.

“They know about that?” His voice has gone flat.

“They know enough to write that sentence.” Anger comes into my scent before I can stop it, heavier the longer I look at the closed cover. “There were guards outside, and Graves had access to whatever the temporary bond was reporting medically. I don’t know how much they saw and how much they inferred.”

Orion keeps staring at the folder. “They measured that too.”

Kael’s jaw tightens, but Malik answers first. “Everything after the bite. Distance, touch, nightmares, sexual regulation, separation. They weren’t waiting to see whether the bond stabilized you. They were recording how quickly it changed both of you.”

I can still see the kitchen floor, the shattered bowl, Orion shaking against me while his body finally stopped fighting itself. I remember getting him to the bathroom, his fingers closing around my wrist because he didn’t want me out of reach, the way he stayed human afterward because he chose to. Somewhere outside the house, somebody turned all of that into response time, contact distance, and successful regulation.

They gave us walls and watched what we did behind them anyway.

I put my hand palm-up on the table. Orion hooks two fingers around mine while Malik scrolls to another set of files, his grip tightening before the page even finishes loading.

“Ursus is the only line where the post-bond observation starts after a temporary bite,” Malik says. “Then I found these in Arlo’s pre-Wolfscorge records: pheromone-pressure tests, pheromone response, bond retention, repeated questions about prolonged isolation. They may have accelerated Orion’s side of the experiment, but they also spent three years preparing yours.”

The reviews I ignored come back in pieces. Questions about my rut, my scent, aggression, whether the empty house bothered me, whether I noticed other designations leaving scent behind after meetings. At the time it all felt like the same institutional shit copied into a new form. Now the pattern is too clean to miss.

“No pack scent, no existing bond, nobody close enough to interfere,” I say. “They kept me isolated until Orion arrived already shifting, then Graves started pushing the permanent bite on a deadline.”

Malik nods. “Which is why I think the deadline is experimental, not legal. They want the permanent bond inside a specific window. I just can’t tell you yet what they expect to happen when it closes.”

Orion’s fingers tighten around mine until my knuckles ache. I leave my hand where it is, letting the pressure sit there while the room goes quiet around us.

From the kitchen, a child laughs loudly enough to carry through the wall, followed by Preston telling somebody to leave the bread alone. The noise belongs to a normal house, somebody arguing over food while a kid gets into something he shouldn’t, and it makes the reports in front of us feel worse rather than better.

Orion reaches for the folder again. I let him take it, watching his eyes move more slowly than mine over the page. His lips move once around a term before he points near the bottom. “Provoked separation response. What does that mean?”

Malik leans over to find the line. “They documented what either of you did when the other was out of sight. Your market trip without him. What Orion did when you shut the office door. The Council visit when they threatened to reassign him.”

Orion’s face empties out, his knee pressing harder against mine under the table.

“They’re not just watching whether we bond,” I say. “They’re watching what happens when somebody interferes with it.”

Kael swears and drags a hand over his mouth. I look at the word provoked again and think about every threat Graves has made since Orion arrived. Reassignment, removal, containment. Every one of them could’ve been pressure applied on purpose, another hand against the cage just to see what reaction they got back.

I shove the folder away before I tear it in half. What makes the page worse is how ordinary the entries look. Times, distances, pulse rates, the duration of a nightmare, whether I crossed the room when Orion made a sound. Somebody watched through our windows and wrote down every time I crossed the room for him, the handwriting never changing no matter what was happening inside.

Whoever recorded the night Orion came apart wrote it with the same pressure they used for a meal schedule.

Kael pulls the reports toward himself. “Curtains stay shut. Anything they can see from a tower gets covered. If they demand medical testing, one of us is in the room and somebody from our side writes down exactly what happens.”

Thane looks toward the window. “And if they force a separation anyway?”

“Then we stop pretending it’s procedure.” I glance at Orion. “We treat it like deliberate provocation.”

Orion’s jaw tightens, but after another look at the surveillance report, he gives me a small nod.