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LEO

Z ap!

I awoke with a jolt, the entire world spinning so violently, my body rattled with it.

Wait, no, that was actual electricity zinging through me, courtesy of the bleary figure standing around me.

Where was I? What was happening?

It took me a couple of moments to remember. Right. We’d infiltrated the medical facility, which turned out to be less of an office and more of a secret lab dedicated to experimenting on magical folk. I’d known the brothers were twisted, but somehow seeing so many different people in cages made it all the more real for me. They were some real sick fuckers. The world would be better with them put down.

Except it seemed I was the one who was at risk of being dispatched at the moment.

Another surge of electricity went through me, and every muscle in my body tensed, making me jerk and seize against the restraints binding me to the metal table.

It took an age to end, and when it finally did, I was both breathless and smoking. It was morbidly fascinating, but the haze of pain made it hard to appreciate the phenomenon of my body rapidly healing after such a strong shock.

As for the masked goons in lab coats around me, they simply observed what was happening and casually wrote it down, like torturing me was the most boring, academic thing in the world. Honestly, it was a bit insulting. Was I not putting on a good enough show for them? Was torturing me not entertaining enough for them?

Bastards.

My inner wolf howled to get out, throwing itself at the edges of my mind, but it was locked so tightly inside of me that I knew without a shadow of a doubt it wasn’t getting out. It wasn’t me keeping it in, though. There was something else within me that was stopping it from coming out. If I had to guess, these fuckers had probably dosed me with wolfsbane. That was one of the oldest tricks in the books when it came to us wolf shifters.

“Subject’s heart rate has returned to the appropriate range,” one of the scientists said, and, God, it made me wanna rip his throat out, even with my blunted teeth.

“Hmm, so far, it appears that being conscious hasn’t decreased or increased the body’s repair rate.”

The body! I had a fucking name. Granted, I didn’t want these people to know my name considering who their bosses were, but still. It was like I wasn’t even a living, sentient being to them. I was just an experiment. Something to observe, but never empathize with.

I held on to that anger as they shocked me again and again. After that, things grew too hazy, and I couldn’t keep track of what was going on. It was all torrential surges of pain followed by a slow slide toward normalcy, but never quite getting there before the next wave rolled in.

When my mind finally cleared enough for me to actually observe what was happening around me, I saw that the electric paddles were gone, and they were hooking me up to an IV bag. I had no idea what was in there, but I was sure it wasn’t good. Considering their warm-up had been trying to fry my brain, I wasn’t looking forward to seeing what round two would look like.

Not that I had a choice.

Once more, I fought against the silver restraints locking me down, and once more, that did absolutely nothing but bruise my wrists. I didn’t need the scientists’ input to know it was taking me longer to heal.

Fuck.

On top of torturing me, which I wasn’t really a fan of, they were getting all sorts of vital information on my species that probably would not go into good hands. I hated the idea of the brothers being more knowledgeable on how to exploit my kind.

The concern in my mind was quickly obliterated as burning pain consumed my entire body. I tried to resist it at first, but it overrode every single one of my senses. All I heard was my own ragged screaming. My vision was blurry and red, like I was too low on health in a video game. I could taste my own blood on my tongue and smell a strange chemical concoction wafting from my skin. As for feeling… It was pure, undiluted agony, unlike anything I’d ever felt before, and I hadn’t exactly had an easy life.

With no way to fight it, the only thing I could do was retreat from it. I buried myself in my mind, trying to dissociate into happier, warmer memories.

I thought of the first time I lost a tooth, and Ricky explained the concept of the tooth fairy to me. I didn’t have parents at the time to place a quarter under my pillow, yet one had been there when I woke up. Now, I had no doubt it was my best friend or his mother taking on a role they never should have had to.

I thought of when my father came home from a long trip to recover part of our territory from an encroaching pack to find me having burnt some toast in an effort to make him something to eat. A strange smile had crossed his features and then he’d hugged me. Back then I’d thought he was laughing at my silly mistake, but my adult perspective told me he’d been crying.

I wished I’d had more time with him. I wished he hadn’t been killed by another power-hungry alpha who wanted to forcibly subjugate our pack.

But I couldn’t delve into that memory now. No, now was time for happiness. For all those warm little moments that made life worth living. The times in between. The smiles, the jokes between friends, the good meals shared in warm kitchens, the soft touches. All of it.

Of course, thinking of good and soft things brought up so many memories of Ven. In the grand scheme of things, we hadn’t spent that much time together, but it didn’t surprise me how many of my happy recollections had her as the lead actress. The way the sun shone through the windows of her greenhouse onto her hair while she worked. The smell of the soil as the two of us spent time together in her garden, creating food in a way I’d never had before. Sure, I’d hunted many times throughout my life, but that was always taking a life. Vanessa? She made life, which dazzled me right down to my core.

So, I let her protect me. I let her be my haven away from the torture. I let myself get lost in the memory of her smile, find comfort in the recollection of her scent, to relax into the ghost of her touch as if it was happening at that very moment.

It didn’t completely block out the pain, but it made it survivable, and that was all I needed. Because these wizards or whatever they were could do whatever they wanted to me, but eventually, I would find a way to get back to my pack. I was their alpha, after all, and I had a mission. One way or another, I would find a way out.

Back to my pack.

Back to Ven.

It was with her on my mind that I allowed myself to fall into the blissful nothingness. Because unlike so many other times in my life, I wasn’t truly alone.

How long had I been held in the strange prison I’d ended up in?

I didn’t know.

Part of me thought it could only be days, yet another part felt like it could be years.

I was so darn hungry it felt like my stomach was eating itself, yet it felt like I was constantly nauseated to the point of losing whatever I had last eaten. They didn’t feed us, at least as far as I could tell, just kept us attached to those cursed IV bags. It didn’t always hurt, which suggested that some were for experimentation, and some were for sustenance, but I was still wary of them.

Not that it really mattered.

I hated how weak I was, but whatever they were pumping into me severely limited my natural abilities. If I had to guess, I would think I had worse senses than a human now. I felt about as weak as a toddler. It was humbling, that was for certain.

But I still tried to fight. Granted, the keyword was tried . I wasn’t exactly successful, considering my heavily-damaged state. However, when they came to my holding cage to pull me out yet again, I made another attempt.

“You think he’d get the point by now,” one of the larger handlers said. Although I was often out of my mind from the drugs, I had been lucid enough to figure out that there was three classes within the staff of the medical facility.

First were what I called the scientists. I didn’t know if that was their actual classification, but that’s how they seemed to me with all of their poking, prodding, and writing down the results on their notepads, or typing them furiously into a tablet. They were clearly the head honchos of the day-to-day stuff, and my torturers.

Next were the handlers. The muscle. It definitely seemed like if you were mindless enough, they bewitched you somehow. Perhaps by a mindwalker or the remaining brothers. Considering the broad expanse of mindwalker abilities—humans knew them as psychics—I couldn’t really say one way or the other. But the handlers were the ones who got us in and out of cages and fought whenever anyone mustered up the strength to resist.

And lastly, the janitorial staff. There were only a few of them, and never more than two on one shift, but I got the feeling that all of them were there against their will. Maybe it was the soulless look in their eyes, or the way they were always working, monotonously trudging to their next task. It wasn’t like I could ask any of them—the muzzle around my mouth prevented speech. They didn’t want me to bite either them or myself. I couldn’t help but wonder how many they’d lost from that particular trick before figuring out a way to stop it. Normally, even chomping through one of the thick veins toward the broadest part of the tongue would heal before it could do much damage, but our situation was far from normal. I was pretty sure someone could stab me, and my wound would heal even slower than a human’s.

“Yes,” the other handler said so flatly, it pretty much confirmed my suspicion that not all of them were in full control of their faculties. That made me burn with even more rage for the brothers. They really had a knack for absolutely ruining people’s lives in the worst way possible.

Even though it was clear the more lucid one was mocking me, I still tried to fight as best I could, and just like every other time, it didn’t stop anything from happening. I still ended up strapped to that damn medical table in those impossible silver bonds.

I wanted to sneer at the scientists who only came in once I was fully secured. Wanted to taunt them about their cowardice and show them I wasn’t scared of their disgusting methods. But with the flat metal holding my tongue down, I could only glare. God, I hated them. One day, I would tear out all their throats.

Surely Ven would understand.

I tried to stay alert as one of the assistants disappeared into that first room with all the vials and returned with an IV bag that was a completely different color than any other they’d used before on me.

That was probably not a good thing.

God, after I’d been trapped in my wolf body for so long, I never would have thought I’d yearn to have it again. But being trapped in my human form wasn’t much better, and although I liked being sentient, I despised feeling vulnerable.

I could only glare at them as they hooked the IV and inserted the line into my arm. The first couple of times I’d woken up cold and exhausted in my holding cage, I’d ripped the IV out just to make their life a little more complicated. But every time they simply put a new one in, and in more inconvenient places than the last, so I’d given up on that particular method of resistance.

Sometimes it took a couple of minutes for me to feel the effects of whatever concoction they were giving me, but not this one. After being deprived of both halves of myself for quite a while, I could feel the call of my wolf almost instantly.

Joy rushed through me, a strange feeling in the hellscape I was in, but it was quickly snuffed out when I realized what was actually happening. I wasn’t shifting because I had suddenly gained the ability. I was shifting because the liquid pumping into my veins was forcing me.

Ah, so it seemed that we were doubling down on that whole not-a-good thing.

Although I had no idea why they would possibly want to try to force me into my wolf form, it wasn’t something I wanted to hand over to them. I tried to fight it. I tried to resist, but it was like trying to subvert gravity. My wolf was an inevitable, primordial force rushing toward me, trying to swallow up everything I was.

Once more, I was struck by how much they could pervert everything about being a shifter. My wolf and I were supposed to be two halves of the same coin, working in conjunction with each other. We were the same yet different. One mind, one soul, spread across two forms.

But the drugs were subverting that, turning my wolf into a mindless beast ripping my thoughts in two as it tried to claw its way to the surface. It wasn’t me at all. It was something else.

I couldn’t shift. I couldn’t . I needed to fight it as long as I could, even if it felt like I was trying to fight the urge to breathe. As inevitable as it seemed, I had to try.

Fur began to ripple down my body, and at that exact moment, the entire world seemed to shake. It was subtle at first, the warning before a storm, but then a true furor broke out.

Was it an earthquake?

No, that didn’t make sense. I was pretty sure we weren’t in a part of America where that was an issue. Whatever was happening shook me so hard that my teeth—an uncomfortable combination of wolf canines and human bicuspids—rattled.

Everything was a haze of chaos as the lights around me flashed red and the staff straight up fled from the room. I tried to lift my body to see what was going on, but the restraints kept me in place. My fingers were beginning to crack and bend, unsure which form they were supposed to be, and I got the impression it was supposed to be painful, but I was so hopped up on whatever they’d given me, I couldn’t really feel it.

I hated how much they messed with my mind. I didn’t know if it was resisting the shift or the chemical cocktail that was causing my thoughts to begin to melt into each other and turn unintelligible. I only knew it was growing harder and harder to think by the second.

Thoughts were sliding into each other, as were the few colors I could make out through the haze of red lighting. My tongue was still sloppily trying to form words, fighting against the flat metal attached to my muzzle that was keeping it in place. Everything was a cacophony, a sheer torrent of sensation and information that my brain simply wasn’t capable of understanding.

But then, like an angel parting through all the fire and brimstone surrounding me, Ven’s face came into view.

She was so beautiful.

I’d always known that, but it struck me in the moment. Everything else was a blurry, confusing mess, but her face stood out in perfect clarity.

I tried to say something, although I didn’t quite know what. Not that it mattered as it couldn’t get past the metal in my mouth. Ven, the specter that she was, murmured something, then very real hands were on either side of my head, undoing the restraints that kept me in place.

Ven produced a key from God only knew where, then undid the rest of the restraints. With every shackle falling off me, more slivers of clarity began to sink in until I could finally understand some of what she was saying.

“Don’t worry, I’m here. We’re going to get you somewhere safe, okay?”

Safe? Of course, I would be safe. I was with her, wasn’t I?

Of course, seeing her meant I was likely in the deep throes of torture, but that didn’t really matter if I couldn’t feel it, right? Even the wolf that had demanded to be let out was easing back, settling into its usual territory within my mind.

“The others are making it safe for us to go, so all you have to worry about is sitting up when you can. Don’t try to speak now. Just focus on your breathing, please? For me?”

The others?

As if on cue, Ricky appeared within my field of vision, along with two other people I’d never seen before. I’d read somewhere once that our minds couldn’t make up new people in our dreams, so maybe I hadn’t slipped into a torture-borne disassociation.

But if that was true, it meant Ven was indeed right in front of me.

“Okay,” Ven said, voice still so soft and syrupy. “We’ve got all the restraints off. Do you think you can sit up?”

Sit up? Sure, even babies could sit up, and I most certainly wasn’t?—

Huh.

I tried to sit up, but my muscles weren’t receiving signals from my brain. I lay there, tongue slack in my mouth, staring up at my four rescuers. If they were real, they had to be having some wild thoughts about me at the moment.

“I don’t think you can,” Ricky said. Even in my messed-up state, I could hear the concern in his voice. “You two carry him. I’ll make sure to clear the path. Ven, you bring up the rear.”

“Will do.”

They picked me up off the table that had become so much of my world and carried me through the chaos. There was more screaming and what sounded like fighting, but I couldn’t really focus enough to see it. It wasn’t until we were nearly out the very door that had first locked me away from Ricky and Ven that I managed to get my wits about me enough to speak.

“Wait!”

I would have cringed at my weak and reedy voice if I was physically able. Ven was at my side in an instant, gripping my hand.

“What is it? Are you okay?”

“The others…” I wheezed, hoping that would be enough, but when I saw confusion on their faces, I knew I needed to say more. It was difficult considering how fuddled and slipshod my thoughts were, but somehow I was able to grab on to an idea enough to get it out of my mouth. “We have to free the others. We can’t leave them behind.”

Ven’s voice was only soothing as she brushed my sweat-soaked hair off my forehead. “I know, dear. We’ve got people on it.”

People? What people?

As if she could hear my thoughts, she stroked my hair one more time. “We learned our lesson and came with a whole lot more than just the four of us. We’ll make sure not a single person is left in a cage.”

Oh.

Relief flooded me as heavy as any drug, and whatever fight I had left in me faded. I could only barely cling to consciousness as we hurried to the elevator I’d thought I would never see again, then up and out of the building. I wanted to ask more questions, but even without the metal contraption in my mouth, I couldn’t quite work up the wherewithal to speak.

However, my vision cleared up enough to see that there were four vehicles waiting for us, engines all running. They placed me in the back of the van, where the seats had been flattened and blankets laid out. The two who had been carrying me hurried up front while Ven and Ricky settled beside me. They slammed the doors shut and peeled out before I could say a word. There was still plenty of room for others.

Worried, I raised my head enough to see more figures rushing out of the building and piling into the other vans and truck before also speeding off. Had we really done it? Were they all free?

I didn’t know, but I took solace in the fact that all the vehicles were taking off in different directions. Even if one of us got caught, the majority would make it.

I couldn’t believe it. As I watched the facility get smaller and smaller in the distance, it suddenly exploded.

I stared, dumbfounded, until one of the strangers from the front spoke. He was missing an eye, but his other one shone with malevolent glee as he twisted in his seat to look back at us.

“I always said I was gonna burn that place down, and I always keep my word.”

I stared at him in confusion, then a memory triggered. Right, he’d been there when I’d first been captured. I’d caused such a ruckus and so much damage then that about ten experiments had escaped their cages. He had to have been one of those who got free.

And he came back for me.

Well, he came back for all of us.

I was touched. I had spent so much of my life taking care of others and had largely considered myself expendable, but Ven, Ricky, and a stranger had risked everything to save me.

Even though I’d forced Ven to abandon me.

Yeah, I’d have to face the consequences of that, but it could wait. Everything could wait. For the moment, I just wanted to close my eyes and enjoy my freedom.