Page 2 of Untamed

I look toward Slate and think about what we know of his history—six bond removals, years of damage, a body the Collective kept pushing until something inside him changed. Orion had one ugly bite scar from what little I saw, yet the bear was already there, full-sized and violent enough to send guards reaching for rifles. “They’re getting better at it. If they’re building Feral packs, either he didn’t need an Alpha to push the change forward or they already passed that stage before they brought him here.”

Preston shifts the sleeping pup higher against his chest, careful with the tiny head while he watches me closely enough that I already know I’m not going to like whatever comes next. “We assumed you figured out the other part.”

Something in the way he says it puts a knot between my shoulders. “What other part?”

“That the bear was probably meant for you.” The teasing edge is gone now, which bothers me more than if Preston had smiled through it. “You went after him before you knew what he was, Arlo. You barely speak to people you’ve known for three years, but one drugged bear shows up and you run into the middle of a recovery operation.”

I almost tell him I only helped because Orion was in trouble, but the defense feels thin before it gets anywhere near my mouth. Trouble has never been rare here, and I’ve walked past plenty of it without throwing myself into the middle. Two weeks later I can still remember Orion’s Omega scent beneath blood and sedatives, and worse, I can remember the pull that came with it, the part of me that wanted back into his space before I knew there was a man inside the bear, before I had a name to attach to the feeling.

Kael watches me across the table long enough that I know he caught the answer I didn’t give. “You went after him before you knew what he was. Nobody had to tell you to care. Now add the rest. Three years here, an empty pack house, no assignments, and review after review asking about your rut, your scent, your aggression, and whether isolation bothered you.”

The old evaluations come back in pieces, every sterile little question I treated like a box somebody needed checked before they could leave me alone again: rut frequency, scent control, aggression, sleep, whether living alone bothered me, whether I wanted a bond badly enough to become a problem without one. At the time, none of it felt important enough to remember; sitting here now, with Orion’s scent still lodged somewhere in my head, the questions look a lot less like neglect and a lot more like somebody taking measurements.

“You think they kept me alone for him.” The idea tastes worse once I say it. “No pack scent. No existing bond. Nobody close enough to interfere until Orion arrived.”

Thane gives a slow nod, his attention moving from me to the scattered records between us. “We know they were pairing specific Feral Omegas with specific Alphas. Slate wasn’t random, and neither were Kael and I. If Orion was already farther along when he reached Wolfscorge, they may have been waiting for the Alpha side of his experiment to be ready too.”

Something scratches beneath the couch while the room goes quiet around me, one of the pups digging at whatever he’s managed to wedge under there, and the stupid ordinary noise makes the thought settle harder. My house and the reviews, three years of being conveniently ignored while other people were moved, bonded, reassigned, watched—it all starts lining up in a way I don’t like. I’d taken the quiet as the closest thing Wolfscorge was ever going to give me to control, and now even that starts looking staged.

“I’m next, aren’t I?” The question comes out lower than I mean it to, because Orion has been sitting under everything we’ve said from the moment I walked in.

I’ve wondered whether he woke up human, whether anybody told him where he was, whether they kept him sedated after the guards took him. Once I found myself halfway toward the administrative side of the compound before realizing I had no reason to be there that wouldn’t draw exactly the kind of attention I’d spent three years avoiding.

Preston catches whatever shows on my face, but Kael gets there before he can poke at it. “Nobody’s saying you have to do anything right now. We don’t even know where they’re keeping him.”

My attention snaps back to Kael hard enough that the chair legs scrape under me. “You don’t?”

“They moved him after he was stabilized,” Thane says. “Graves stopped answering questions after that.”

Anger hits my scent before I can bury it. Slate’s eyes flick toward me and then Kael, while Thane’s posture tightens in answer to another Alpha filling the room with aggression around his pack, so I force my shoulders loose and drag the pheromones back against my skin before irritation turns into something the entire room has to manage.

None of that does a damn thing for the thought underneath it. They moved Orion somewhere nobody can find him, after three years of keeping me untouched and asking questions I never realized were measurements.

I push to my feet with the whole shape of the last few years sliding sideways in my head. I’d told myself they ignored me because I’d learned how to be useful, quiet, forgettable enough that nobody wanted the trouble of looking too closely. The alternative was admitting somebody might have been keeping me alone on purpose, preserving the empty house, the unmarked skin, the lack of pack scent until the right Omega arrived already halfway changed.

If that’s what they did—if they kept me untouched for Orion—then even the solitude I thought was mine belonged to them first.

Chapter Two

Arlo

My knuckles are raw by the time we get Orion out of the woods again, and my lungs still burn from hauling several hundred pounds of unconscious bear over wet ground while the guards mostly shouted directions. He lies sprawled across the gravel now with three sedation darts buried in his flank, too still except for the slow rise of his ribs, and the restraint I spent two weeks rebuilding starts fraying the second one of the guards nudges a limp paw with his boot.

“Watch it. The specimen’s heavier than the last one. Get the transport restraints on it before it wakes up.”

Specimen. It. The words scrape harder than they should, especially with pine, earth, fear, and Omega still clinging beneath the blood and sedatives, the same scent I haven’t managed to get out of my head since the first escape. My Alpha catches on the sweetness before I can bury it, bristling under my skin while Orion lies unconscious at my feet and strangers start fastening restraints around him like none of them have noticed there is a person somewhere under all that fur.

When they haul him toward the Main House, I follow without deciding to. Mud dries in streaks behind my boots across the Administrative House’s white tile, ugly enough against all that polished stone that somebody will probably write it up later, but I keep going until I reach Graves’s office. He’s behind the same mahogany desk in the same pressed suit he seems to wear whenever somebody else is bleeding, his pen moving over a ledger with the calm of a man who didn’t just have a drugged Omega dragged past his windows.

“Where is he?”

Graves takes his time looking up. Interest brightens his blue eyes before the rest of his face moves, and I know that look well enough after three years to feel my jaw tighten. “You don’t usually come here unless you’re required to. What changed?”

“The bear. Where did you take him?” There’s more Alpha in my voice than I mean to give him, enough that the words sit heavier in the room, but Graves only leans back and glances at the mud drying near his desk as though that interests him almost as much as I do.

“You mean the Omega? Orion Cavell Wolfscorge has been moved to containment for his own safety. He’s proving difficult to manage.”

Orion. The name settles differently now that I have it. Graves ruins it almost immediately by adding Wolfscorge, tacking the compound onto him like whatever came before can be filed off and replaced. I’ve heard the official version since the first escape—feral bear, murdered Alpha, unstable Omega—but I’ve also watched their guards kick him while he was too drugged to stand, and I’m getting tired of pretending those two versions have equal weight.