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He had also promised that someone was coming for us, some of my people who hadn’t betrayed me. I had little faith in him, though it wasn’t Misha’s fault. The fact that it was Wolves who sold me had shaken me to my core. He was right, though, when he pointed out that even the oppressed would commit depraved acts in order to grab what little power they could.
In the war, I’d witnessed acts of treason, acts of self-preservation, all to get ahead.
And I now knew first-hand what Wolves in positions of oppressed power would do in order to keep their status and the compliance of our people. They would sell us to keep the peace for the rest of them. And our people—the Wolves who had been fighting against being caged, against tyranny—would go along with it. For the greater good.
For a while.
But it wouldn’t last. Wolves like me—the survivors—wouldn’t stay silent for long. I didn’t have to see a rebellion or know its name to know it existed.
It took me agonizing minutes to trace the room with the tips of my fingers, but the floor was bare apart from the mattress, so I was spared falling on my face while I located the door and finally let myself out. I followed my nose after that, to the scent of packaged, dried meat and bread. The house was freezing cold, but I could also smell the first tendrils of smoke from a fireplace.
“You’re up,” the human said as I came around the corner. Misha’s voice was familiar, and I hated the relief it gave me when he stepped close enough that I could feel his presence within reach. He took my hand and laid it on his shoulder, and I followed him with shuffling steps into the room I knew was large from the echo around us. “You have to be hungry.”
“Starved,” I admitted with a grunt. We stopped, and my foot touched the edge of a cushion, which smelled like mold, but not as badly as the mattress had.
“You can sit. I found a few more supplies your friend left us in the kitchen. It’s a bunch of canned shit, some MREs, some jerky.” His voice faded off for a second as I got settled, and then the floor beneath me rumbled with his footsteps as he returned. “Are you, uh… Can you see anything yet?”
“My healing is taking time,” I admitted, but nothing else. He didn’t need to know that I was even more vulnerable now, that there wasn’t enough change. That whatever remaining sight I had the night before was now gone. I was still weak, and it would take months for me to build up to my original strength. “I’m stronger than I was yesterday. I think most of the drugs have left my system.”
He let out a thoughtful hum, and I could hear him messing with something plastic. “I guess that’s good. Uh… do you have any questions, or…?”
I raised a brow in his direction, because I wasn’t expecting him to be so forward. I did have questions. More than a few. Like who the fuck had known I was there, and how had they managed to get us both out? “Do you remember anything about the Wolf that helped us escape?”
“Not really,” Misha said, and he let out a small, forced sigh as he sat. I jolted when something pushed against my hands, but I quickly realized it was a pack of jerky and what felt like half a loaf of stale bread. It was pathetic rations but felt like a feast in my state, and this time I didn’t try to be polite about stuffing my face. “He was probably your age, but I think you guys age differently than we do so it’s hard to tell.” He paused and I assumed he made some sort of gesture because I felt a short breeze of air pass by my ear. “He was tall, big—like really big—dark hair, blue eyes. He seemed very docile, but I have a feeling that was all an act.”
I snorted through a lump of food, then swallowed. “Most likely. I was entirely unconscious for days—maybe weeks—after they brought me in. Otherwise, I would have clawed my way out.”
Misha made a small, considering noise, then I felt a familiar plastic bottle touch my knuckles, and I took down the water in huge gulps until it was empty. “I don’t know if he survived the blast. I wish…” He stopped and then sighed again. “Anyway, he said Wolves would be here to retrieve you soon.”
“Are you afraid?” I asked, hearing the small tremor in his voice and the way his heart thumped harder in his chest.
At that, Misha laughed, though there was no humor in it. “Fucking petrified. I’m starting to wonder if I just went from one torture to another. I know your kind doesn’t like mine. Not after…”
Not after everything the humans put us through, I finished in my head for him. I remembered the PR statements going out right before the Equinox Treaty was going to be signed.
No revenge, just equality.
It had been a giant crock of shit, but people wanted to believe it. Hell, I had wanted to believe it. I’d wanted to be done fighting, done being afraid that every sunrise was going to be my last. But I knew better.
I knew that the humans were monsters, but there was darkness in us too. Greed, corruption, apathy. There was no escaping what we were willing to do to our own kind, and I wasn’t sure how to go forward from there.
I ran my fingers over the water bottle, feeling out the shape of it, trying to remember what had happened right before I was taken—but it was all a blur. My throat went tight with frustration and hints of fear that I would never recover—that the humans had cut me down, stripped me of my power. And what would happen then? When those who came to rescue me expected to find a leader, and instead found an emaciated Alpha who couldn’t shift, couldn’t heal, couldn’t see. What would they do?
Culling the herd was necessary in days like this, when the rebellion would only be as strong as their weakest link. I sent a small prayer to the gods that I hadn’t suffered through everything, managed a narrow escape, only to die in the end.
My thoughts were interrupted when Misha let out a small grunt of pain, and then I smelled him again—that heady, omega smell that never totally went away.
“Do you know what they were doing in that lab?” I asked, shifting backward until I hit the wall. It braced me, and I allowed my body some measure of relaxation.
“Not exactly,” he said, but there was the hint of a lie in his words. “I wasn’t allowed to look around, and it wasn’t a place I spent time in before…”
Before his own father betrayed him. “He never talked about his work?”
Misha scoffed. “He talked about it constantly, but it all seemed so unrealistic. He was obsessed with the idea that Wolves and humans couldn’t reproduce. He would ramble on at the dinner table about RNA and DNA and other shit that I never understood.” Misha was quiet a long moment, and I allowed myself a second to wonder what he looked like. He sounded young, and he sounded terrified. “He was convinced that a Wolf-human hybrid would be the answer to military problems.”
I grimaced. We’d all been taught the history of the first Wolf-human alliance. It was long before my time and crumbled before it could really take hold. But programs had begun to try inter-breeding, and they were never successful. Humans and Wolves could love each other, and fuck each other, and co-exist with little conflict—if they allowed it. But our genetics weren’t compatible. Humans could not shift. It wasn’t more complicated than that.
“What did he hope to gain?” I asked.
