Chapter 3

Chapter

Three

MIKAEL

B eing one of the few on the council who remembered life before the vicious hands and sharp words of humans reduced our community to glorified zoo animals wasn't easy. Listening to young pups who couldn't remember the peace that we were fighting for—or, at least something like it—was hard, because their ideas were so damned unrealistic.

They envisioned this Wolf-human paradise where one battle, one treaty, one speech would suddenly erase generations upon generations of hate. These new versions of humans would be open-minded and ready to embrace us with all the love and equality we had been denied since before they were born.

Of course, all anyone had to do was look into human history to know this wasn't possible. Humans still oppressed each other with the same viciousness as they did us. But they had a common goal now—a shared hatred for glowing eyes and claws and fangs—so they could set aside what they were doing to each other and work together. It was hilariously ironic in a lot of ways.

But mostly it left me feeling once again nihilistic, because they were incapable of change. If they couldn't see each other as equal, there was no hope for us. Our only option was to carve out space and pray they left us alone, but even that was a pipe dream.

Of course, these young Wolves never wanted to listen to me. They didn't understand loss the way I did. They didn't see an entire life systematically stripped away. They weren't turned from a docile professor into a solider trained to gut and kill anything that crossed its path.

Our need to fight turned us into the monsters humans feared we would always be—and somewhere, deep in my mind, I wondered if maybe, in that one thing, they were right.

I was twenty-two when the first laws began to creep over Wolf borders. I was twenty-four when my family was ripped apart. Even with the new rules and regulations against our kind, I never fully believed they'd do us actual harm.

After all, we had no military to fight them, no resistance to overthrow the government. We were historians and scholars and doctors and lawyers. We were spouses and parents and school teachers and pharmacy workers and restaurant owners.

My life changed—twisted into something ugly that nearly killed me the night my mate was murdered. We'd met when we were sixteen, shared our first heat and rut together at seventeen, and bonded that same night. Our parents were furious that we'd gone so far. It was difficult enough to exist as we were—mating without hesitation with any gender of Wolf—trying to blend into human society who believed that just added another layer to our monstrosity.

But Galen and I were happy, and it was hard to care, even if we couldn't hold hands in public. We had a small ceremony, his parents gifted us a little one-bedroom cottage on the edge of town. We finished school together; he started up his little accounting firm, and I went on to attempt to mold teenage Wolf minds—or at the very least, convince them that learning wasn't actually torture.

And life was nice. It wasn't perfect, and I felt the walls closing in on us as the months crawled by and more laws were put into place. But I never thought they could really touch us. Those long nights I spent deep inside Galen during his heat, staring into his eyes, I felt untouchable. He'd smile at me with his slightly crooked canines and his soft blond hair that swept over his forehead, and I'd believe in forever.

The only conclusion the police ever came to about his death was that he was murdered by humans. I felt it, when the attack began. I felt his pain ripping at me through the bond. I was on my knees in the middle of the supermarket, gasping for breath. Someone managed to get me outside, but by the time they dragged me to the stone bench, I was only half-conscious.

He died somewhere in that time—in those impossibly short minutes between the front door and the shop wall. And it felt like someone was ripping my lungs out.

I woke in the hospital on a ventilator four days later with a doctor telling me it was a miracle I survived. I didn't have the voice to tell him that surviving was torture. That living with the carved-out, empty space where Galen had been was a fate worse than death.

I would have allowed myself to waste away if it hadn't been for that first bomb—and for the news that an army was recruiting. It was our chance to get revenge. We likely wouldn't survive—Wolf armies across the globe were rising up, but we were small in numbers compared to the humans, and we had no training.

But we had natural weapons, and speed, and we could survive the most terrible conditions.

Hate fueled me, but by the time the treaty was signed, and Galen was twenty years dead, all that was left was a hollow shell and a Wolf who had made more mistakes than he cared to admit.

The day I stood with the Alpha Council with my pledge to join was the day I almost quit. A lot of my past, fighting at the front, had been an absolute blur, and I preferred it that way. After Galen died, I never indulged my rut.

It was the only way I could survive the grief of losing Galen, especially during leave after months at the front fighting to live.

But the night I met him —the small, dark-haired Omega who made me want to hold him and never let go—I had been shaken to my core. I'd smelled him in that bar, followed him outside, needed to sink my knot into him like I needed to breathe.

He was young and pliant, and he smelled untouched. The last thing I wanted to do was risk my heart again, but he was impossible to resist. I had to have him, and when he looked at me with need in his eyes, every ounce of my resolve shattered.

I sank inside him and something changed.

Something connected .

It was stronger than it had been with Galen that first time we spent his heat together. The fledgling bond glowed bright, tempting, my fangs dropping as I stared at the crook in his shoulder. And I could feel him—I could feel every atom in his body begging for it.

I wasn't sure how the hell I resisted, but I managed it. Even as I locked our bodies together and held him as he drifted into unconsciousness, it took everything I had not to give in. I had never wanted before—not like this. And it was petrifying because I knew what lay at the end of that road. I wasn't na?ve enough to believe that Wolves couldn't find a mate twice, as rare as it was. But I knew one or both of us would likely die before the war was over, and I couldn't go back to the field with a bonded.

It wasn't fair to either of us.

And even if I was guaranteed to live through it, my heart wouldn't let go of my past. It wouldn't stop reminding me that in the end, it was just emptiness and pain and suffering.

So, I ran. Like a fucking coward, I ran and hid and waited for the damn thing to fade out.

It took months, terrifying me to my core that something had gone wrong, and I'd managed to make it permanent during the knotting. I could feel him every second of every day—the quiet pain I had caused by disappearing and leaving him on his own. I could feel it in his bond that I had been his first—his only. I could feel his heart ache and his growing belief that he was not worth more than a quick, anonymous fuck.

I'm not sure how I managed to close myself off. Every instinct told me to find him, comfort him, assure him he was the perfect mate. Instead, I drank myself into a stupor, then killed as often as I could manage it. I threw myself into every reckless battle set before me in hopes it would end.

And one day, it did, just not in the way I expected.

One day, I woke up with the dawn, and there was nothing left but a ringing echo of what was. The war was over: Wolves and humans were signing a treaty, and we were free.

It was the first time I had cried since laying Galen to rest, and I prayed to the gods it would be my last.

I comforted myself with knowing I would never see that Omega again when I went back to society. The world was huge, and he was so beautiful; there was no chance at all he hadn't found a mate who treated him like the gift he was. I was just happy to settle into some shitty apartment and ride out the rest of my long, pathetic life on my own.

And even when Zane Bereket showed up on my doorstep with a proposition because we all knew—deep down—that it wasn't over, I felt good about accepting. After all, the world had moved on and so had that perfect Omega.

If only I had fucking known what was waiting for me the day Zane announced the council to the small band of Wolves ready to take on both sides of the government.

"Mikael, stick around after the ceremony. I need to introduce you to my brother. He's the geneticist I was telling you about." When he clapped me on the back and took me across the room to meet his Omega sibling, I didn't think anything of it.

Until I looked at those eyes and that soft hair and I realized just how intimately I knew this Wolf.

Years of practice kept me from reacting as I stared at him and listened to Zane sing his praises. Danyal—his name was Danyal. He was a genius and single-handedly going to save our people, his brother declared. He was working on projects that were meant to counter what the humans were doing in labs.

But I was lost, hearing nothing, deep in memories of heat-warm skin and slick as I sank my cock into his body.

He recognized me too. He was an open book, just like he had been the night I found him. I saw the betrayal in his eyes, the hurt, and even the edge of want.

And he was unbonded, which was maybe the worst of it all. No other Wolf had claimed him as his. He was just as alone as I was.

Because war had fostered the cruel beast inside me, I allowed my eyes to deaden, allowed him to believe I didn't remember that night. In his mind, after that meeting, he likely believed he had been nothing more than a warm, slick, willing hole for me to relieve myself. The bond was a consequence I had never wanted, and it was forgotten as quickly as it had formed.

No one would ever hate me as much as I hated myself, so I allowed Danyal his indignation and disgust, and I would be sure to keep my distance.

It would have worked too. It would have been the perfect arrangement if Zane hadn't gone missing and Danyal hadn't run after him like the brave, gorgeous fool he was.

And now it was up to me, because things were a shit-show, and there was no one else to go after him. I knew if I did this—if I volunteered—that would be it. I wouldn't be able to hide how much I still desperately wanted him—how much I knew he was mine. And I supposed, in the end, it would be worth it if I got him home alive.

I waited until everyone had cleared the room apart from myself and Kor, who was standing at the window. He faced the outside, and it was one of the few moments I wondered what it was like for him now—the months under the cruel hands of the humans, returning battered, sightless, then bound to a human.

But I had lived most of my life apart from others. After losing my mate, there seemed no point in letting myself focus on anything other than the mission. But Danyal destroyed that for me now, knowing he was in danger. Knowing what the humans were capable of and letting myself think for even a second about what he was suffering.

"Mikael," Kor said softly, prompting me to speak.

I dragged my tongue over my lips, then let out a small breath. "I'm going after him."

Kor turned his head, and his black eyes fixed on me. There was just the slightest sliver of yellow around his pupils that glowed with his frustration. "We don't know where the hell he is."

"I know, but we have contacts that might be able to trace him now." He knew I was referring to Nadya. I had been her point of contact lately since Kor was attempting to mitigate the fall-out from the information going as wide as it did. "And you can't tell me that you're willing to just let him go."

The day before, Misha's brother—Alexei—had gone public saying he wanted to unite the human and Wolf government. We all understood it for the threat it was. Then we'd gotten the call asking for Kor and Misha's heads, and suddenly those we believed we could trust turned into the unknown enemy once more.

The last thing in the world I wanted to do was abandon Corland, but we couldn't afford to send a team of Betas we couldn't trust after Danyal.

"There's no one else," I said after a long silence.

Kor bowed his head and took a breath, then made his way back to the table where his hand skimmed the top for his phone. "We can't leave Corland to a council of two, and Misha and I have to leave."

My stomach twisted, hearing the plans, but I supposed it's what I would have done. "Do you know where you're going?"

"I think so," Kor said. "But I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell anyone. I'll get Orion and Zane back on the road before I head out, but I'm going to assume you're not planning to stick around for that long."

"You know I can't. It would be stupid not to leave now," I confessed, and I saw the resignation on his face. "I'll make my way down south with Nadya, and then I'll take it from there. If anyone can track Danyal, it'll be her."

He didn't argue with me. "Give it another week," he said after a long pause. "I don't want to risk sending you out for nothing, and there's every chance Danyal will manage his own get away."

Of course, I knew that was bullshit, and so did Kor, but it was protocol. I wanted to tell him he could shove that request up his ass, but it made sense. A week would give me time to line up some contacts and get a better lead on where Danyal had been taken. It was obviously Kasher, but the man was always on the move. And now that Nadya had blown his cover wide open to the rest of the world, he was even further into the wind.

"Fine. But not more than a week," I told him. "The gods only know what they wanted him for." Though that was also a lie. We knew exactly what Kasher wanted with our top geneticist.

"Promise me you'll check in with Talia before you go. She'll be able to tell you what state Danyal's in. If he's as bad as Zane was…"

"Don't say he's not worth the rescue," I snapped, and his mouth curved into a smile.

"I wouldn't. None of us aren't worth the rescue. Just…be prepared for what you find. Orion didn't tell me much, but he didn't have to. I could feel it in the pack bond." He let out a trembling sigh. "Zane's not going to be the same."

"None of us are," I reminded him. Even those of us who'd just been grazed by these wars were forever shadows of our former selves. It was the sacrifice we made to fight for our future. "Which Alpha are you going to bring in?"

"Her name is Aisling," Kor said, and I frowned. I hadn't heard of her, but there was something in his tone that told me he trusted her implicitly. "She won't stay forever. I'm going to have to call in a favor for this, and I know Theo and Francisco won't be happy."

I shrugged and leaned against one of the chairs. "They'll get over it, and with any luck, I'll be back before shit hits the fan."

Kor looked about as convinced as I felt, but it was all we had.