Declan
It’s official: I just went through the longest night of my life.
It takes the place at the top of the list. Above even the night Dad died. Above the night Mom decided she had no choice but to follow him.
I’m starting to understand on a much deeper level now that she had no choice. Not really. I only thought I understood before, on a basic, intellectual level. Fated mates can’t live without each other. It’s worse than death.
Now? After completing the bond? I feel it in my soul. I understand why she did what she did. I’ve thought about it for hours, since the alternative was letting worry for my sister and my mate and my entire fucking pack eat me alive—and sleep was sure as hell not happening.
That red light never once flickered. Somebody’s been watching through it all.
The locks disengage without warning. I’m on my feet before the door opens, which is about all I can manage with the collar humming against my throat and whatever they last injected me with still sitting heavy in my muscles. But I’m standing. That counts for something.
The door swings open, and an orderly pushes Iris through it.
This time she’s on her feet, though barely.
She stumbles over the threshold, and I catch her, my arms closing around her before my brain even registers that I’ve moved.
The bond surges, and the relief is so sharp it nearly takes my legs out.
Behind her, the orderly sets a tray on the floor just inside the door. Two trays, actually. Food. The smell of it hits me, and my stomach clenches so hard it hurts.
“She refused to eat,” the orderly says flatly, already stepping back. “Told Dr. Moore she wouldn’t touch food until she was brought back here.”
I look down at Iris. She’s pressed against my chest, her fingers curled into my thin hospital gown, and she looks up at me with those blue eyes.
She threatened to starve herself, and Moore caved, but not because he cares about his daughter.
He cares about his experiment. And his experiment needs calories.
She knows it, too. I feel it. She sees him for who he is, and yes, that’s painful shit, but she had to wake up eventually. “Smart girl,” I murmur.
The door shuts. Locks engage. We’re alone.
I ease her down to the floor, keeping her close, settling us both against the wall the way we were before they took her.
She fits against me like she was designed for it—which, according to the bond, she was.
Her head finds the space between my shoulder and my jaw, and she exhales, long and shaky, and some of the tension drains out of her.
Through the bond, I feel her fear and exhaustion. And something newer, harder-edged. A cold anger that wasn’t there before.
“You need to eat,” I tell her.
“You first.”
“Iris.”
“You first.” Stubborn. I feel the corner of my mouth twitch. It’s not quite a smile. I’m not sure I remember how to smile right now.
I reach for the trays. Two portions of something that’s trying to pass as scrambled eggs, toast that’s more rubber than bread, and two cups of water.
It’s barely enough for one person, let alone a shifter whose metabolism burns through calories the way a furnace burns through kindling.
But it’s food, and she needs it more than I do.
I hand her a tray. She eats slowly, mechanically, like she’s fueling a machine rather than feeding herself. I scarf mine down. It’s gone in under a minute. My stomach growls for more. I ignore it.
“Tell me about the bond,” she says between bites. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the egg on her fork like it holds answers. “I know what you told me before. But I want to understand more. What does it mean for you? For your... kind?”
My kind. There’s no judgment in the way she says it. Just confusion. She’s trying to understand something she was never supposed to be part of, and she’s doing it from inside a cell where her father locked her.
“It means you’re mine,” I say simply. “And I’m yours. For life. It’s not like a human marriage. It can’t be broken. It can’t be walked away from. When a wolf finds their mate, that’s it. There’s no one else. Ever.”
She processes that. I feel the weight of it settling onto her, the finality of it.
“My parents had it,” I continue. Quieter now. “My dad found my mom when he was nineteen. She was seventeen. He said he knew the second he smelled her. Just… knew. Like the world rearranged itself around her, and everything that came before was just waiting.”
“What happened to them?”
The question is gentle. She already knows, I think. Or she can feel the grief leaking through the bond before I can contain it. I should probably learn to control that better, but right now, I don’t have the energy to build walls.
“My dad died when I was sixteen. Protecting someone.” I don’t say who.
That story belongs to Nora, and it’s not mine to share.
“My mom... couldn’t survive without him.
She tried to hold on. For us. For me and Cole and Zeke and Tara.
But it was like asking someone to live with half a heart. She didn’t last long.”
Iris’s hand finds mine. She doesn’t say anything. She just holds on. I feel her ache for me.
“That’s why I became alpha,” I say. “I was the oldest. With three younger siblings and a whole pack looking at me like I was supposed to have answers. I didn’t have answers. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.”
“You were a kid.”
“Yeah.” I lean my head back against the concrete. “I was a kid.”
She’s quiet for a while. Then says, “My mom died when I was four. I barely remember her. Just impressions. The way she smelled. A yellow dress. I think she used to sing to me, but I might be making that up.” She takes a breath.
“After that, it was just me and Dad. And his work.” The word comes out flat.
I tighten my grip on her hand.
“I used to think I was lucky,” she admits with a soft laugh. “Having a dad who was so brilliant. So dedicated. I thought if he spends more time in the lab than with me, it’s because he’s doing something important. And I got to be part of it.”
She pauses. “I volunteered because I wanted him to see me. As his daughter. I thought if I was brave enough, if I sacrificed enough, he’d finally...” She trails off.
“He’s not what you thought he was,” I conclude. Not cruel. Just honest.
“No.” Her voice is small. “He’s not.”
We sit with that for a while. The fluorescent light buzzes.
The collar hums. Somewhere in the building, machinery runs.
I count Iris’s breaths. In, out. In, out.
Steady. She’s calmer than she was when they brought her in.
The bond is helping, I think. Even in here, chained, collared, and caged, it helps.
Sometime later, the door opens again.
Two orderlies this time, with a guard behind them carrying one of those dart rifles. They don’t take chances anymore. Smart.
“Dr. Moore wants you both in the lab,” the first orderly says. “Blood work and vitals.”
I feel Iris tense against me. I sense her spike of fear, quickly suppressed. “Together?” I ask.
“Together.”
I don’t like it. But together is better than apart. If they’re taking her to a lab, I want to be in the room. I want to see what they do.
They cuff my hands in front of me and walk us down a corridor I haven’t seen before.
Bright lights, white walls, the chemical smell of industrial cleaner.
Iris walks beside me, her shoulder brushing my arm.
She’s wearing the hospital gown they put her in yesterday, and her feet are bare.
She looks like the ghost of the girl I met two nights ago.
Has it only been two nights? It feels like a lifetime.
The lab is large. Bigger than the exam room I woke up in, with multiple stations and tons of equipment. Monitors showing data I can’t read. Two exam tables in the center, side by side, separated by about four feet.
They put Iris on one. And me on the other, then strap me down at my ankles and wrists. The guard stays by the door, rifle ready. The thought of being unconscious and helpless while Iris needs me is the only thing keeping me still rather than fighting.
Two technicians join us, wearing lab coats and pulling on gloves. They start with blood draws. I watch one of them tie the tourniquet around Iris’s arm, tap her vein, slide the needle in. She winces. The tech doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. Just doing his job. I’m sure that’s what he tells himself.
My wolf throws himself against the collar’s wall hard enough that my vision whites out for a second. I breathe through it. Steady. I have to be steady. They’re taking blood. I can handle watching them take blood.
They take mine next. Four vials. My tech doesn’t make eye contact. I’m a specimen to her, just like Iris is to her father.
Vitals next. Blood pressure, heart rate, temperature. They note the elevated readings but don’t comment. Of course, my heart rate is elevated. I’m shackled to a table in a lab run by a man who uses people as test subjects. Resting heart rate isn’t exactly on the menu.
They check the bite mark on Iris’s neck. The tech touches it, her gloved fingers prodding the bruised skin, and my growl comes out before I can stop it.
The tech flinches and pulls back, then looks at the guard. The guard shifts his weight before adjusting his grip on the rifle. “Easy,” Iris murmurs. Through the bond, I feel her trying to push calm through the connection. It helps a little.
Then one of the techs pulls a curtain between our tables. Not all the way—I can still see the top of Iris’s head, her blonde hair against the white pillow—but enough to block my view of what’s happening below her shoulders.
“What are you doing?” I grunt, teeth clenched.
“Pelvic exam,” the tech says without looking at me. “Standard protocol for bonded females in the program.”
Bonded females in the program. Like there’s a whole category for this. Like there are others. Like this is routine.
I hear the snap of fresh gloves. The click of an instrument being prepared. The tech’s voice, flat and professional: “Slide down to the edge of the table, please. Knees up.”
No.
The word fills my entire body. Not a thought. A force that starts somewhere in the center of my chest and radiates outward until my muscles are vibrating with it.
They don’t get to strap her down and examine her like she’s livestock being assessed for breeding. They don’t get to touch her there, look at her there, catalogue what they find and send it back to Moore.
Through the bond, I feel Iris’s fear spike. Not pain—yet—but the cold terror of being exposed and helpless, and it hits me like a fist to the sternum.
I pull against the restraints. Not testing this time. Pulling. The leather straps creak. The metal frame groans. The tech on my side takes a step back. “Sir, you need to remain—”
The left wrist strap breaks. The buckle tears free from the leather, and my hand is loose. I’m already reaching for the other one when the guard raises the rifle.
I don’t care. The right strap goes next.
I swing my legs off the table, the ankle restraints ripping free from the frame with a screech of bending metal that echoes off the lab walls.
The collar is still humming, still keeping my wolf locked behind that invisible wall, but I don’t need my wolf for this.
I’m two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle and fury, and I have a very specific target.
The tech behind the curtain. The one with the gloves and the instruments and the flat, professional voice.
I grab him by the front of his coat and slam him into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. He makes a sound that’s almost a scream, almost a wheeze, before I pull him forward and slam him again. His head snaps back. His body goes limp.
The guard fires.
Not at me. At the vent above the door. A canister lodges in the duct, and I hear the hiss before I smell it. Moore’s gas, the same gas we breathed in at his house. It fills the room fast, thicker than what he used at the house, more concentrated. My knees buckle on the second breath.
Iris is calling my name. I can hear her, can feel her through the bond, terrified and reaching for me. I try to get to her table but only make it two steps before my legs give out and the floor rushes up to meet me.
The ceiling tiles blur. The fluorescent lights smear into streaks. The gas drags me under fast and hard, and the last thing I feel before it takes me is Iris’s fear.
Iwake up on the cell floor.
The concrete is cold against my back. The collar is still there. My wrists ache where the restraints cut in. My head is pounding, and I know it’s the gas hangover. The worst headache of my life.
Something warm and wet is pressed against my chest. Iris. She’s curled against me, her face buried in my shirt, and she’s crying. Not loud. Quiet, exhausted crying. The kind that happens when you’ve run out of everything else.
“Hey.” My voice comes out weak, raspy. I get one arm around her. It feels like lifting a bag of cement, but I do it. “Hey. I’m here.”
She presses closer. Her fingers grip my gown. Her emotions wash over me—fear, relief. Grief? “I’m okay.” I press my lips to the top of her head. “It was the gas. It knocks me out, but it doesn’t… I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” Her voice is muffled against my chest. Thick with tears. “None of this is fine.”
She’s right. None of this is fine.
But she’s here. She’s alive. She’s pressed against me, and I can feel her heartbeat against my ribs. That has to be enough.
“We’re going to get out of here,” I tell her.
I say it like a fact because that’s what she needs right now.
Not uncertainty. Not honesty about how bad things look.
She needs her alpha to tell her it’s going to be okay, and that’s what I’m going to do.
“My pack is out there. Cole, Zeke—they’ll find a way.
Kyran and his bears. They won’t stop looking. ”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s what a pack does. We don’t leave each other behind. Ever.” I tighten my arm around her. “They’re coming, Iris. And when they get here, we’re walking out of this place, and we’re never looking back.”
She’s quiet for a long time. I count her breaths the way I did earlier, tracking them as they slow, as the crying tapers off, and her body gradually unclenches against mine. Her fear doesn’t go away, but something else rises alongside it. Not hope, exactly. Something smaller.
Trust. She trusts me.
I hold her against my chest and stare at the ceiling, and I make a promise. Not out loud, not through the bond, but somewhere deeper than either of those.
I will get her out of here. I will get Tara out. I will burn this place to the ground.
And Elton Moore will answer for every single thing he’s done.