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I was uncuffed but alone in the room with a single rolling tray that held a cup of ice chips, a pitcher of juice, and a call button. I hadn’t eaten anything proper in… I couldn’t remember when, but the very idea of anything more than the ice sent my stomach rolling with waves of nausea.
My hands trembled when I reached for the cup, and I noticed the bruises on my arm were mottled and dark—though I knew that was from the lab and not what Dr. Bereket had done. Strange that in the hands of the enemy, I was treated with more worth than under the supervision of my father—but I supposed I couldn’t deny it was expected.
I let a few cubes of ice melt on my tongue, and when the room stopped spinning, I used the button on the side of the bed to raise up. I was in the room they’d placed me in when I was bound, nothing changed except the smell of an OR clinging to my hospital gown. I wondered where my clothes had gone, but I supposed that trapped in the lab again, I had no use for them.
There was no wardrobe, no desk, no TV. Nothing to connect me to the outside world. It was sterile and isolating—not even a window, though part of me had always wondered if the window in the lab existed solely to torture me with a freedom I would never taste.
With a sigh, I turned over, grimacing at the ache in my belly. It was the same as before—a sort of low, burning pain stretching from the top of my navel to my groin. It was probably worse now with the single puncture wound, and I wondered if any results had come in.
My fingers twitched to push the button—to see if anyone would answer my call—but I didn’t get the chance to test it. I heard a faint buzz, then the click of a heavy lock, and Dr. Bereket came in.
I pushed myself to sit up farther as I eyed the folders in his hands, then I cleared my throat. “Do all your captives get personal bedside visits?”
He lifted a brow as he came to a stop near the end of my bed. “Captive is such a harsh word.”
“And yet,” I reminded him, wincing internally when he made no move to correct me. “So, am I dying?”
He stared at whatever was inside the folder for an eternal moment, and when he looked up, I couldn’t read his gaze. He walked to the corner of the room and grabbed a rolling chair, then scooted it right to the edge of the bed where my hand was resting. “Mr. Kasher, how much do you know about Wolf physiology?”
I couldn’t help a small snort. “Not enough. Every grain of truth we were given was buried in layers of propaganda. And I never really had the opportunity to learn how to sift through it.”
His head cocked to the side. “Try me.”
“Okay,” I breathed out, feeling a little uncomfortable. It felt like I was about to give a treatise on systematic racism—and in a way, I supposed I was. “I know that Wolf physiology is split into three categories. I thought Omegas all had babies, but I’m guessing that’s probably not true.” I let out a small cough when his brows raised.
“Most Omegas have uteri,” he clarified. “But not all of them. I’m an Omega, but I cannot bear children.”
I stared at his eyes for a long moment. “I know that there are heats and ruts—and I’m convinced that they’re not violent rape the way we were taught.”
His face twisted into something disgusted, and he glanced down at the paper, then back up at me. There was something in his gaze that terrified me. “No. That’s not the case at all. Omegas have heats, and Alphas can have ruts if exposed to a heavy amount of pheromones, but we are not mindless when it happens. At worst, we are… uncomfortable.”
I flushed, feeling like he wanted to say something else about it, but I appreciated I wasn’t getting a Wolf sex talk right then. Clearing my throat, I shrugged. “I also know that humans and Wolves can’t produce children.”
“Also correct,” he said, sounding a little surprised.
I snorted a small laugh. “I knew that one because my father was obsessed with finding out why. It never made sense to him since genetically we should have been more compatible.”
Danyal tapped his fingers on the folder. “It actually makes quite a bit of sense. We’re shifters—we have an innate ability to literally morph from one skeletal structure to another. The few pregnancies that managed to survive past ten weeks didn’t survive longer because the children didn’t possess enough of one parent or another. The in-utero shift made the pregnancies non-viable.”
It made sense logically, and I nearly laughed because the reason was so damn simple, but my father had just never accepted it. “No offense, doc, but I’m not really sure what all of this has to do with me.”
He sat back and closed the folders, dropping them to the floor in a neat pile by his feet. His gaze met mine, then he leaned over his thighs and let out a small breath. “Humans envy our abilities. Our lifespan, our healing, our strength. This isn’t the first time that Wolves have been captured for study and experiments. Humans once thought that we carried the Wolf gene in our saliva. We were hunted, tortured, experimented on. It took them five long years to give up the cause when they realized that the secret to our kind was not an infection—we were merely a split in evolution.”
I gnawed on the inside of my cheek. “I’ve been arguing that point for a long time.” When his brows rose, I shrugged and passed a hand down my face. “I’m a scholar. Mostly in early classic anthropology. I wanted to find periods of time where humans and Wolves co-existed. There’s little evidence that survived the wars during Antiquity, but I found some. It wasn’t enough, but it became obvious from very early on that we were not the same.”
“And yet, we could have cohabitated,” he said.
I let out a bitter laugh. “We did. We have. In Ancient Mesopotamia, in Macedonia. There’s overwhelming evidence that Alexander the Great’s lover Hephaestion was a Wolf.”
Danyal looked genuinely startled. “Why is that not common knowledge?”
I gave him a wry grin. “People will do a lot to preserve hatred and xenophobia. The first thing they come for is language and history,” I told him, feeling an ache in my gut that had nothing to do with the experiments. “The story of Rome’s founders was probably rooted in truth. Remus and Romulus were likely raised by a family of Wolves—and the subsequent conflict between them likely drove most of them out of Rome long before the rise of the Empire. When they wanted to subjugate the Wolves, they began the rumors that they were no different from the animal. Eventually history twisted it into the legend most people know today.” I shrugged and laid back, easing some of the pain in my body against the soft mattress. “I never found enough evidence to prove that one though.”
“I doubt you ever will,” he said, and I couldn’t help another chuckle.
“It gets hidden and covered-up in order to protect systematic oppression. Racism, sexism, homophobia,” I answered. “Class wars, poverty. It all stems from the same basic principle—we are incapable of true social change.”
He leaned forward a little more. “Do you think that ending the war between humans and Wolves is pointless?”
