LOGINALPHA GAVIN
I always thought if I ever saw my father again, I’d be ready. Angry. Controlled. Untouchable. Instead, I feel like I’m twelve years old again and standing in a doorway he never walked back through. The lab smells like antiseptic and burnt circuitry. Metal and cold air. My lungs drag against it like the oxygen is rationed. Maybe it is. Everything here feels measured. Like it’s calculated, engineered. Including this moment.ALPHA GAVIN I know something is wrong before the alarms decide to admit it. The change doesn’t come through sound or sight first. Instead, it comes through the bond, through that invisible architecture that has been strained, muted, distorted, but never truly gone. It twists suddenly, like a cable pulled too tight through living tissue, and my body reacts before my thoughts catch up. My breath locks. My pulse misfires. “Alessi,” I say. Not loudly, not dramatically. Just with the certainty of someone who feels gravity shift under his feet. Across the chamber, she sways. For one disorienting second, it looks almost graceful, like a dancer losing balance mid-turn, and then the color drains from her so fast it doesn’t read as illness. It reads as absence. Heat leaving matter. Light stepping out of a room. Every protective instinc
I wake to warmth. Not the artificial temperature regulation of the chamber. Not the filtered air cycling through vents overhead. This warmth lives beneath my ribs, low and steady, like sunlight diffused through bone. For a moment I lie still and study it the way I’ve been trained to study everything, observe before interpreting, measure before concluding. My pulse is slower today. The erratic spikes that once fractured my rhythm have flattened into something almost elegant. Neural interference has quieted. The tremor that used to haunt my fingers is absent when I lift my hand into the light. “Stabilization curve is holding,” I murmur, mostly to confirm the data aloud. Even my voice sounds clearer. Good means progress. Progress means the system is functioning. I sit up slowly and glance through the glass partition. Arissa is already awake. She isn’t reviewing monitors or watching tec
ARISSA / PATIENT FIVE I do not have a before. Not a broken childhood. Not a painful one. Not a stolen one. Just… none. My first memory is of a light that never turned off. Not sunlight, a word that I learned later on, but ceiling light. White. Flat. Endless. It made no shadows. It erased depth. It erased edges. It erased time. I learned time from footsteps. Morning shift walked faster. Night shift dragged their heels. I counted the difference before I learned numbers. I learned numbers from heartbeats. Mine was always slower than the machines expected. “Interesting baseline variance,” they would say. I thought ‘Interesting’ was my name for a while. Before they called me Five. Patient Five. Project Five. Subject Five. Never daughter. Never child. Never girl. Just Five. I did not know I was alone until I learned wha
ALPHA LUCA I always believed betrayal would feel hot. Explosive. Loud. Obvious. I was wrong. Real betrayal is quiet. It wears your family name and speaks to you in a calm voice while dismantling your future piece by piece. The stabilization wing looks nothing like a prison. That’s intentional. The floors are polished stone. The lights are warm instead of harsh. The doors slide instead of slam. Control disguised as care. My father designed it that way. I would bet blood on it. “They’re managing perception,” I say under my breath. Harley glances at me. “What?” “Environment softening. Lowers resistance. Increases compliance.” He bares his teeth. “I don’t comply.” “You will if it helps her,” I answered quietly. That lands. He looks away. We are escorted down a curved corridor instead of a straight one. No long sightlines. No easy mapping. Subtle disorientation architecture. Expensive. Infuriatingly effective. Gavin walks on my other side, silent in a way that is not natur
ALPHA GAVIN I always thought if I ever saw my father again, I’d be ready. Angry. Controlled. Untouchable. Instead, I feel like I’m twelve years old again and standing in a doorway he never walked back through. The lab smells like antiseptic and burnt circuitry. Metal and cold air. My lungs drag against it like the oxygen is rationed. Maybe it is. Everything here feels measured. Like it’s calculated, engineered. Including this moment. “They’re separating the subjects,” someone says behind the glass. Subjects. Not names. Not people. I lift my head slowly and the effort alone makes my vision grain at the edges. My body is still shaking from the degradation waves as if the sickness is chewing through my blood like acid through wire. My wolf is quieter than I’ve ever felt him. Not gone. Just… weakened. That scares me more than pain. Across
ALPHA LUCA I was raised to read rooms before I entered them. Power leaves a scent. Control leaves patterns. Lies leave fingerprints in silence. This room stinks of all three. My father stands twenty feet away from me like nothing here is personal. Like I am not his son. Like the girl on the platform is not a person. Like the two Alphas swaying beside me are not dying in front of him. Like this is business. Really, I should not be surprised. Honestly, I am still furious enough to taste metal. The containment field hums around me. It’s invisible, impenetrable. A clean circle of light distortion that bends the air. Elegant tech. Efficient. Soulless. Very him. “You’ve lost weight,” Salvatore Moretti says mildly, glancing at me as if we’ve met for lunch instead of war. “I fought through three security layers to get here,” I answered. “You’re welcome.” A faint smile. “Still dra
For the first time in weeks, I was surrounded by noise that wasn’t charged with the electric tension of three Alphas circling each other, and me, like predators claiming territory. After coming inside from the porch, we had started our brainstorming. Laughter bounced off the walls of the lakeside
ALPHA LUCA I didn’t realize how much I missed her until I saw her name on the resort’s guest list. Alessandra Noone. One line on a clipboard. One little signature scribbled in her messy handwriting. But my heart had practically thrown itself out of my chest when I spotted it. She was here.
After discovering something important and terrifying at the same time about our bonds then running off without a word, telling the boys that I was once again leaving was another story. I thought they would yell, you know, out of shock or frustration, or both. But it didn’t come. Then I thought t
ALPHA GAVIN I knew something was off when I found out Alessi had collapsed out of nowhere. Sure, she could have just been tired, too, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't connected. I needed to. This made me realize that I had been so focused on fixing the bond that I didn’t stop to think what i







