Chapter 9 Elijah
ELIJAH
Ihad never spent time in a containment room before, only signed off on the parts that made it function. I oversaw them, approved the specifications, and put my name on the dimensions, airflow, and lighting, all of it designed to keep alphas calm and compliant when their instincts ran too hot.
Containment neutralized, to flatten emotion into something manageable. It did not work on me.
The room felt too small the moment the door sealed, and the locks slid home with a dull, last sound that vibrated through the walls and into my teeth. The air shifted as pressure recalibrated, and my chest tightened as if the space itself had reached out and wrapped a hand around my lungs.
I forced myself to stand still until the dizziness passed, because movement would turn it into panic. My boots stayed planted on the cold floor, grounding only in theory.
Containment rooms were smooth by design, built to deny leverage. No sharp edges, no corners to hook fingers into, pale walls that reflected light evenly so the eye had nowhere to rest and nowhere to hide.
My beta did not find this calming, and the reaction was immediate. It found it suffocating, a slow crush that started behind my ribs and spread outward until it tried to dictate my breathing.
Containment stripped away hierarchy and motion, the two things my beta relied on to regulate. There was nowhere to pace, nowhere to redirect excess instinct into purpose, so the pressure had to go inward.
I sat on the narrow bench bolted to the wall and placed my hands flat against my thighs, fingers spread, palms down. Posture mattered and ritual mattered, because control started with the body when the mind threatened to spiral.
It was already slipping, and I could feel it in the way my pulse refused to settle. I had told myself, at the moment, that I was choosing the lesser harm.
I could still smell her sweet peach sent. My dick throbbed in my pants, and I undid them. At this point I didn’t care if the pack was watching me. I needed to get her out of my blood. She was underneath my veins.
I moved my hand up and down on my dick, my thoughts going back to when I laid eyes on her. Nyx had thick curves, the kind I wanted to hold every night. I groaned at the very thought, undressing her in my mind.
She lay back in my imagination, her thick thighs spread open. I fucked my dick harder, thinking of her screaming out my name.
“Elijah.” It was almost like I could hear her cries in my mind. I grunted as cum spilled out of my dick. My orgasm was too fast and not satisfying. I wanted Nyx bouncing on my dick, her tight pussy squeezing down.
I looked down. Now I was hard again and covered in my cum. I sighed and stood up walking over to the small sink. I used paper towels in the room, grating on my dick, but it was better than leaving myself sticky and uncomfortable.
I walked back over to the bed and sat down again, doing my pants up before that. I was just buying myself time. I had told myself a forced bond was a tool and not a violation.
It was a lie I built fast enough to stand inside, and it held only until the door sealed, and I could not pretend there was a different interpretation. I had put my teeth on her without permission.
I had taken her choice, used her body, and then dressed it up in pack language so I could keep breathing. Call it forced bonding, call it insurance, call it strategy.
It was rape, and the word made my stomach convulse as if my body tried to expel it. The bench felt narrower under me.
My beta was not built for dominance. It was built for balance, for mediation, for holding tension between forces without becoming the force itself.
The bond had inverted that role. It demanded response without granting authority, connection without dominance, intimacy without consent.
It hummed beneath my skin, wrong and incomplete. I felt it every time I swallowed, a tug low and sharp in my chest, and every time my heart stuttered the connection scraped instead of settling.
This was not how bonds felt, and my body knew it even when my instincts tried to lie. The ache never softened into comfort, only sharpened into a jagged insistence forged through panic and instinct rather than consent.
My jaw ached as if the act still lived in my muscles, as if my teeth could remember what my mind refused to hold for too long. The memory came in flashes I could not control, her scent turning frantic, her body going rigid, and the exact moment the pack stopped being civilized and became a cage.
I pressed my palms harder into my thighs until pain sharpened my focus. I closed my eyes and counted, because if I did not, I would start tearing at myself in ways no one could stop.
Prime numbers only, because they felt clean in my mouth. Order without emotion, structure without interpretation.
Two. Three. Five. Seven.
My breathing slowed by fractions, and my hands stopped shaking enough that I could unclench them. It did not erase what I had done, and it did not soften what I deserved.
The door slid open, and the sound of it was too bright in the small space. I wanted it to be Nyx Brooks, but they would not let her near me.
That was intentional. After what I had done, proximity was no longer a risk the pack will take.
The bond still throbbed beneath my skin, a low, jagged hum that had nothing to do with distance and everything to do with consequence. I did not need to see her to feel the damage I had caused.
The door behind me opened again, and the air shifted before I even looked up. Malachi entered the containment room without hurry.
The space reacted to him the way it always did. Pressure recalibrated as if the room recognized authority and bent and even the lights dimmed by a fraction as his dominance settled heavy and absolute around us.
He did not raise his voice and he did not waste motion. He simply stood there, and the room tightened.
My beta recoiled, not from fear but from compression. The walls felt closer the longer he remained still, and the ceiling pressed down another invisible inch until my lungs fought for depth.
My breaths came shallow as I straightened instinctively, spine locking as if posture alone could keep me from folding inward. Malachi’s gaze tracked the details I could not hide, my clenched hands, the tremor in my fingers, the way my breath stuttered before I forced it smooth.
Something crossed his face, sharp and fleeting, not anger but shock. It was the look of a man watching a trusted structure crack.
“You forced a bond,” he whispered.
The words struck with physical force, not an accusation but a verdict. Final and heavy.
“Pack Meridian does not survive unless on my orders,” he continued, voice steady, controlled, each word placed with surgical precision. “Not internally. Not externally. We were built on loyalty and hierarchy. On my orders.”
His eyes did not leave mine. “You tried to usurp my authority.”
“I,” I tried to say more, but nothing followed.
My throat locked, and the pressure in my chest spiked as the bond flared in response. Heat and pain tore through me in the same instant, sharp enough to steal the air from my lungs.
It was not arousal. It was backlash.
The bond did not care that I hated myself or that Nyx did not want it. It only cared that it existed, that it had been made, and that it had a direction it demanded.
“I raped her,” I said, because cleaner words were a coward’s shelter and I had already taken enough shelter. My voice came out thin, scraped raw by shame. “I told myself it was control. It was not. It was theft.”
Malachi’s jaw tightened, and the containment lights caught the tension in the muscle. He turned away from me and paced the length of the cell once, boots striking the floor with measured restraint.
The movement stirred the air just enough to make the walls feel as though they were closing faster. When he stopped and turned back, his eyes were hard.
“No,” he said. “You chose this. Her.”
He held my gaze. “And still, you made a choice.”
My beta shrank under the force of it. Containment pressed inward, stripping me of motion, stripping me of mediation, leaving instinct nowhere to go but back into itself.
I swallowed and tasted bile, and I did not look away. If I could not undo it, I could at least hold the truth without flinching.
“I will not allow this to happen again,” Malachi said, voice low but unyielding. “Not from you. Not from anyone in this pack.”
He paused, jaw tightening as if the next words resisted being spoken. “She is expendable.”
The word landed wrong, and even here I saw it. A brief tension at his temple, a fraction of a second where his alpha pushed back before he crushed it down.
Silence swelled, thick and suffocating. My lungs kept trying to find depth they could not claim.
“This changes everything,” Malachi continued. “Our leverage. Our structure. Our future. We will be watched for this. Tested for it.”
The door slammed open. Jabari came in fast and uncontrolled, all forward momentum and barely leashed fury.
He breached the threshold at speed, fists clenched, shoulders forward, feral dominance rolling off him in waves that made the containment lights flicker violently. His scent hit the room hard, raw and unrestrained, crashing into my beta instincts.
My chest locked, and the air turned heavy enough to swallow. Jabari’s eyes snapped to me, red-edged and burning, and for a split second I thought he was going to close the distance and finish what instinct had started earlier.
“Kairo,” he snarled. “Where is he?”
The absence was louder than sound, a blank space that said everything. He was with her.
Jabari took a step toward me, and his alpha surged with it. The dominance turned physical, slamming into the room.
My beta locked up instantly, lungs stuttering as if the air had been punched from my chest. My knees weakened, body responding before thought could intervene.