Declan
I come back to consciousness slowly, like I’m surfacing after diving into deep, dark water. Water that’s strangely thick, heavy. It means I have to fight for every inch, but I do fight, because the fight has never mattered so much.
My body doesn’t feel like mine. It takes conscious effort to turn my head to the side. I try to move my arms and metal bites into my wrists. My ankles, too, when I manage to move my heavy legs an inch. Cold and rigid.
Shackles. I’m shackled to something flat and hard. An exam table, like in a hospital. Steel under my body, leather straps over the metal cuffs for good measure.
And there’s something around my neck.
It’s tight. Not enough to choke me, but pretty damn close. A band of metal that sits flush against my throat and hums with a faint vibration I can feel in my teeth. I reach for my wolf on instinct, the way I’ve done a thousand times, as natural as breathing… and I hit a wall.
He’s there. I can feel him pacing behind something I can’t see or name, but I can’t reach him. Can’t shift. Can’t even get close. Like this collar is designed to keep the animal locked away, and it’s working.
I’m basically human. I’m chained to a table in a room I don’t recognize, dressed in a hospital gown, with Moore’s drugs still in my blood and making my thoughts slow and sluggish when I’ve never needed them to sharpen more.
The room is small. Concrete walls, no windows.
There’s a drain in the floor that somehow hits me harder than anything else about this situation.
A single fluorescent tube overhead buzzes and flickers.
The monitor mounted high on the wall to my left is dark.
A camera is mounted in the corner, the red light steady.
My skin prickles. Everybody knows a red light means the camera is on. Someone is watching. By now, they know I’m awake.
I pull against the shackles. Testing, not panicking. The metal holds. The table doesn’t budge. Whatever they’ve bolted it to, it’s not coming up.
I need to think. Where am I? Moore’s facility, the one we were staking out. The last thing I remember is the fight. The dart in my leg. The second one in my shoulder. They brought me here.
Cole. Zeke. Did they get out? Are they here too, in rooms like this one? Or did they make it? Not knowing about them is worse than the confusion about where I am and what it all means.
And Tara. I told her to stay with Iris. Did she? Did these fuckers go to the house?
A sound reaches me through the walls. Faint at first, distorted by concrete, but unmistakable. A scream. High, raw. The kind of sound that can only come from white-hot pain.
Iris. I don’t need my wolf to know the sound of her voice.
My whole body goes rigid. I wrench against the shackles hard enough that the metal cuts into my skin and blood wells up around the cuffs. I don’t feel it. She’s screaming. Somewhere in this building, behind these walls, she’s screaming, and I can’t get to her.
“Iris!” My voice bounces off the concrete, coming back to me flat and useless. She can’t hear me. No one can hear me except whoever’s watching through that camera, and they don’t care. Or maybe they do, maybe they like it, which only makes things worse.
The screaming goes on. Then it stops. Not gradually, not trailing off, just stops like someone flipped a switch. The silence that follows is worse.
I lie still, breathing hard. Blood runs from my wrists down my forearms, dripping onto the steel table.
My heart is slamming against my ribs so hard I can feel it in my throat, and my wolf is throwing himself against whatever wall that collar has built between us, howling in a register only I can hear.
What are they doing to her?
Minutes pass. Or hours. I can’t tell. I stare at the ceiling, and I count the flickers of the fluorescent light, and I wait, because that’s all I can do.
The door opens.
Moore walks in first. White coat, clipboard, reading glasses perched on his nose. He looks like he’s walking into a board meeting, not a cell where he’s keeping a man chained to a table. Behind him, an orderly in scrubs pushes a gurney through the door.
Iris is on the gurney.
My lungs stop working. She’s on her back, wearing a hospital gown, hair damp with sweat and plastered to her face.
Her eyes are half open, rolling, unfocused.
She’s shaking, her whole body caught in a tremor that makes the gurney rattle against the floor.
Her lips are moving, but nothing’s coming out.
Just these small, broken whimpers that hit me somewhere so deep I didn’t know the place existed.
“What did you do to her?” The words rip out of me. “What did you do to your own daughter, you bastard?”
Moore glances at me over the top of his glasses. “The treatment is proceeding as planned. Her body is responding exactly as anticipated.”
“She can barely—” I pull against the shackles again, hard enough that pain shoots up both arms. “Look at her. She’s in agony. How can you do this?”
“She volunteered.” He says it the same way she did. Same flat certainty, same practiced ease. “Iris understands the importance of this work. She always has.”
He nods to the orderly, who wheels the gurney alongside my table. Close enough that if my hands were free, I could reach her. She’s right there, inches away, trembling and whimpering, but I can’t touch her. I can’t do anything but lie here and watch.
“Now then.” Moore sets his clipboard on a counter and removes his glasses, folding them carefully into his breast pocket. “You are going to complete the mating bond with her.”
The words don’t register at first.
I stare at him. He stares back expectantly. Like he’s waiting for me to process a set of instructions.
“What?” My voice is barely a whisper.
“The mating bond. The biological imperative that connects a shifter to their destined partner. I’ve studied it extensively. I know it’s already begun between you—the physical response, the protective instincts. All documented indicators.” He pauses. “I need you to complete it.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“I assure you, I’m not.” He pulls a small remote from his coat pocket.
“The completion of the bond triggers a cascade of biological changes in both parties. In Iris’s case, with the serum already integrating into her cellular structure, the bond will catalyze full transformation.
It’s the final piece. Everything I’ve worked toward depends on this. ”
I look at Iris. She’s looking at me, or trying to, her eyes drifting in and out of focus, her hand twitching on the gurney like she’s reaching for something she can’t find.
She doesn’t know what he’s saying. She’s too far gone to understand any of this.
Or maybe that’s what I need to believe, because the alternative—her knowing how cold and unfeeling her own dad can be—is damn near heartbreaking.
“No.” I say it clearly. Some things don’t require strength or power. They just require certainty. “I’m not doing that. Not like this. Not to her.”
Moore watches me for a moment. Then he nods slowly, like he planned for it. “I thought you might say that.”
He raises the remote and presses a button. The monitor on the wall flickers to life.
The feed is grainy but clear enough. A cell like mine, with concrete walls, no windows, a drain in the floor. And in the center of it, sitting on the bare floor with her back against the wall and her knees drawn to her chest, is Tara.
She’s got a collar around her neck. Her dark hair hangs in tangles around her face, and there’s blood on her shirt—not a lot, but enough. She’s conscious. Alert. Her green eyes are scanning the room with the sharp focus of someone who’s already tried every way out and came up empty.
Cold nausea grips me as I watch her. My sister. My blood.
I’ll kill every single one of these fuckers.
“Either you mate with Iris,” Moore says, his voice as calm as if he’s discussing the weather, “or your sister pays the price.” He looks up at the camera in the corner of my cell. “I’ll be watching.”
The orderly releases my shackles. “I wouldn’t consider it,” Moore murmurs when instinct makes me sit bolt upright, ready to tear them both to pieces. All it takes is a glance toward the monitor to get the message: whatever I do, Tara will pay.
He leaves without another word, the orderly on his heels. The door locks behind them, followed by the heavy thunk of a deadbolt.
I stare at the monitor. Tara stares at the walls of her cell. Iris whimpers on the gurney beside me, lost in whatever hell the serum is putting her through.
My wolf is howling. Not with hunger, not with want. With rage. Pure, black, bottomless rage. The collar keeps my wolf caged, and Moore knows it. This is what it looks like when a man who’s spent years studying us puts that knowledge to use.
And the part that makes me want to tear my own skin off is how my wolf wants her. Even now. Even like this. The bond doesn’t care about consent or coercion or the fact that a man is watching through a fucking camera and using my sister as a bargaining chip.
But this is wrong. All of it. Iris can barely open her eyes. Even if the bond is real, even if she’s my mate, completing it like this would mean giving Moore exactly what he wants. It would mean he wins. It would mean everything he’s done was justified. Because it worked.
I can’t do that. I won’t.
On the monitor, a door opens in Tara’s cell. Two men walk in. They’re big, dressed in the same tactical gear as the ones who invaded our territory. They approach her slowly, deliberately, and she presses her back harder against the wall, her chin lifting, her jaw set.
The feed cuts out. The screen goes black.
And then I hear it. Even through the concrete, even through the walls, and the distance and the hum of the collar at my throat. Tara’s scream.
It’s not like Iris’s. This is my baby sister screaming because someone is hurting her, and she can’t stop them, and I can’t save her.