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Fair enough. It’s hard to argue with that. “Neither will I. I nearly died at the hands of your friends.”
“Yeah, lucky you had the female with you. She’s strong. What happened to her eyes?”
I don’t answer. I’m not giving him anything about Dove until I know he’s safe.
“So many secrets.”
“Why did you come here, Ayden?”
Ayden’s eyes squeeze shut, and pain ripples over his face. “To talk.”
“And you do that by sneaking around in the woods?”
His eyes open, and he pins me with his glare. “We weren’t sneaking. We were scouting. We knew your compound was around this area, but we didn’t know precisely where. Hard to talk to someone when you can’t find them. We didn’t expect such a hostile welcome.”
“Why did you want to talk?”
“To come to an agreement. Your females are strong. We need strong tau if we’re going to come out of this alive.”
“So you want to use the girls. Like the Order.”
“The Order would take them and force them to fight. We came to ask them to join us.”
I didn’t expect him to say that, but he’s right. The Order would just take them. There wouldn’t be a choice, let alone a dialogue. The outcome would be the same, though—they would be in danger. Even thinking about Dove going into a battle against trained soldiers makes a homicidal rage wash through me.
“You think anyone here is going to agree to their mate dying on a battlefield in a war we don’t understand? No way. I believe you’re not with those bastards, but that doesn’t mean we’re on the same side, kid.”
His head tips back to look at the ceiling. “This is what the Order does, Jackson. It creates confusion and fear. It divides us, pitting us against each other so that it can do what it needs to.”
I don’t doubt that he’s right. Divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book. “Respectfully, what do you know about anything? You’re just a?—”
“A kid?” He interrupts me before I can say it. “Among our kind, there’s no time to be innocent. We’re hunted the moment our true nature is discovered. I’ve been through more than you could even imagine, and I’m barely sixteen. I’m tired of running, of wondering if today might be my last day. I want to live. I want to have a family and pups of my own. I want to stop being afraid.”
The sadness in his tone isn’t feigned. I can see his trauma in every line of his body. I sink onto the couch directly in front of him, linking my fingers together between my parted legs. “I need you to start from the beginning, kid. If you want us to trust you and help, we need all the information you can share.”
“Okay. What do you want to know?”
“Who are you working with?”
“The head of our group is called Callum. He’s a tau like me. A hell of a guy. He’s saved so many of us. At first, he just rescued hybrids he found, but eventually we started fighting back. There’s maybe thirty of us. A mix of tau—both male and female—wolves, some hybrids that are half human. Basically, those who don’t fit in.”
“And they’re fighting the Order?”
“Trying to. It’s not always easy. We lose a lot more than we win. They have resources we don’t, though we’re better equipped than in the past.”
“You know what the Order is doing to the hybrids they take?”
I have the feeling he doesn't want to answer this, and not because he doesn’t want to divulge secrets, but because what he knows is disturbing.
“Ayden?”
He sniffs, as if trying to control his emotions. “It took our group a while to figure it out, but yeah, we know. We just don’t know why. At first, we thought they were gathering tau to use against other tau, but it’s so much worse than that.”
Cold spreads through my veins when he doesn’t answer. “Ayden, what are they doing to the girls they capture?”
His mouth pulls into a line, and he opens his mouth to answer.
“Jackson!”
