Chapter 3
Mariah
I sat on a wobbly stool at his counter, clutching the glass of water in both hands, trying not to notice how the meaty taste of the jerky still lingered on my tongue.
Trying not to notice how my chest had stopped heaving, and how my body had stopped trembling like a cornered animal even though he was still in the room.
Varek leaned against the edge of the desk, arms folded, his startling eyes gazing back at me. He hadn’t moved closer again, hadn’t tried to touch me and his restraint unnerved me almost more than his bite had.
I cleared my throat, breaking the silence. “Why are you willing to help me with this?”
His brow lifted slightly.
“I’m not stupid. You’re a commander. You’re Outer Guard. Wolves like you don’t save girls like us. So why?”
He didn’t answer right away. He just watched me, like he was weighing how much truth I could handle. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet and composed.
“Because I don’t like what the Council is doing to human females like you.”
The words scraped against my chest. I clenched my jaw, but the fight drained out of me as fast as it flared. I hated that his calmness had that effect on me. Hated that part of me wanted to lean into it, to let it steady me.
“Who are you really?” I asked after a long moment.
This time, an emotion flickered across his face. Not pain exactly, but an emotion close to it. He shifted, standing straighter, and he squinted slightly, as though remembering ghosts.
“I was a human once,” he said. “Before the bite. Before the Collapse twisted the world. I fought. I bled. I lost.” His voice roughened, just a fraction. “And I’ve been at war ever since.”
He didn’t elaborate, but he didn’t have to. There was weight behind his words, a weight I recognized. He’d lost someone.
I swallowed, my voice quieter. “That’s not the story the girls told.”
His gaze hardened. “What did they say?”
I looked down at the chipped glass in my hands, tracing the rim with my thumb. “That you were ruthless. That you didn’t blink when you killed men or shifters alike. That you’d sooner tear out a throat than take a breath and grant even one ounce of mercy.”
His jaw worked, but he didn’t deny it.
Finally, he said, “They’re not wrong.”
I looked up, meeting his eyes. “So which is it? The ruthless commander or the man trying to… what? Comfort me with water and jerky?”
“Both. I’m merciless because I’ve had to be. This world doesn’t leave room for softness. Not for wolves. Not for men. And not for women like you. But that doesn’t mean I’m not capable of it.”
The honesty in his tone scraped me deep inside. I hated that I wanted to understand him.
I set the glass down with a small thud, pressing my palms against the counter to keep my hands from shaking. “You want to know what it was like?”
His brow furrowed. “What?”
“In the cells,” I said, my voice tight. “With the other women. You want to know what your Council does with us when you’re not looking? I’ll tell you.”
I didn’t wait for his answer. The words poured out like bile.
“They kept us in rows of steel cages. No windows. No clocks. Just white walls and a single vent that hissed like it was laughing at us. They turned the lights on and off and I assumed that meant day and night. Didn’t know if it had been hours or weeks.
They fed us enough to keep us healthy at least.”
My throat closed, but I forced it to let the words out. “The girls… they talked. Whispered to each other through the bars. We told stories about who we were before. It made the dark feel less endless.”
I stared at my hands, nails biting into my skin. “But then the guards came. Always two, sometimes more. And they would take one of us. We never knew who it would be. We never knew if she’d come back. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she didn’t. And then her cage stayed empty for a while.”
My voice cracked. “I kept waiting. Every day I waited. For them to come for me. To drag me out. To be forced to spread my legs. To be r—” I swallowed hard, bile rising.
“But they didn’t. I don’t know why. I don’t know if they were saving me for someone in particular, or if I was undesirable, or… why they hadn’t come to get me yet.”
Silence stretched. My eyes stung, but I refused to let the tears fall.
When I finally looked up, his gaze hadn’t left me.
“I’m sorry for what the wolves do to you.”
His gaze didn’t waver, and he didn’t blink. He just looked at me like the weight of the world was on his shoulders and he was finally tired of carrying it alone.
Something in my chest cracked.
I crossed my arms, shifting a little, trying not to let him see the way my throat and chest tightened. I wanted to stay angry. I wanted to pout, to cling to the fury that had kept me alive this long, but damn it, he wasn’t sneering. He wasn’t mocking me.
He was telling the truth.
My lips twisted. “You don’t get points for sympathy, Commander.”
“I’m not asking for points.” His voice sharpened, not with anger but with conviction.
“I’m telling you I’ve never supported what’s been done to human women.
Not the cages. Not the forced breedings.
Every part of it is an abomination. Every time I’ve looked the other way, I’ve hated myself a little more for it. ”
I blinked at him, stunned into silence. Wolves didn’t talk like this. Not the ones I’d seen, not the ones who strutted around the facility with leers and cold eyes.
He stepped up to me carefully, his massive frame moving with deliberate caution.
“You asked me why I marked you. Why I claimed you. I didn’t do it to punish you or to remind you of your place.
I did it to pull you out of the madness forced into you.
To break through the haze before you tore yourself apart or the wolves beat you to it. ”
The words sank in, dragging my pulse down with them.
I hated what he’d done, but without it, I wasn’t sure I’d still be breathing right now.
I bit my lip, looking away, cheeks heating. “I still don’t like it.”
“I don’t expect you to,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to like it, but it kept you alive.”
I sighed, half a pout, half an admission. “Yeah. It did.”
The silence stretched again, but it wasn’t suffocating this time. It settled over us like a fragile thing.
“With you, maybe finally, we can make a difference. The Council thinks they hold all the cards. They think they can drug and breed and kill until the world bends to them, but I know better and if you’ll let me, Mariah… we’ll show them together,” he offered, cocking his head a bit in my direction.
My heart gave a painful, traitorous lurch. His voice was so confident, so sure, like there was no doubt in his mind that I could matter. That we could matter.
I stared at him, my lips pressed tight, fighting the quiver in my chest. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that one girl and one wolf couldn’t stop an empire.
But a flicker of hope lit anyway.
And for the first time, I didn’t shove it down.
“Kendra, Lia… how are they?” I managed to ask.
A flicker of warmth shifted across his face. “They’re stronger than when you last saw them,” he said, his voice soft and reassuring.
Relief flooded me so fast my eyes filled. I gripped the edge of the counter, my breath catching. “Stronger?”
He nodded. “They’ve both been marked and claimed. They’re wolf shifters now, mated to good men who would burn the world down before they let harm come to them. Men who love them.” His gaze softened.
My chest squeezed so hard I thought it might crack. I could picture them—my friends, my sisters in everything but blood—alive, and stubbornly defiant.
The bite at my neck throbbed again, heat radiating through my veins. My stomach twisted as I realized something else.
I wasn’t just a girl anymore. I wasn’t just human.
His mark would change me too. It already had.
I pressed a hand against the mark, the skin tender under my fingertips. It pulsed faintly, like it had a heartbeat of its own, echoing mine.
I’m not human anymore.
The thought landed like a stone in my chest, heavy and unmovable.
I was a wolf now too.
And no matter how much I hated him for it, no matter how much part of me wanted to shove him away and scream, another part of me knew this truth would never be undone.
I was his mate and there was nothing I could do to change that.