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Roxy looked over at me, a frown on her face. “I think… the moment the truth comes out, people will think that you were caught in the middle.”
In other words, they wouldn’t know any of this was my choice—that the bond wasn’t my choice.
But the Lincoln pack already believed I was pathetic.
Roxy vanished behind the curtain to try on the dress she’d been handed, leaving me to think.
Decebal had sent me some studies at last, and I’d read some fascinating, if unfinished, studies on the correlation between aura instability and aura strength. The reason it had been cut short wasn’t mentioned, but the last thing the study had listed was man-made impacts on unstable auras.
It would make sense that the Institute wouldn’t want the knowledge of how to artificially destabilise auras to be public knowledge. But if they cut the study short, then it also implied they knew what the results might show.
I thought back to the trials that Umbra and Dusk had been in. Pushed to the edge. Caged up. Atropa’s poison put into the very air they breathed.
Was that knowledge already in the hands of others?
People who were using it for their own gain. For money.
It hadn’t just been about bets. What they’d done to Umbra and Dusk was deliberate and calculated. Decebal and Dusk had listed extensive theories, linking the bets to the tests, believing that they were studying endurance.
Weaponising alphas wasn’t a new concept; there was money in that, and wars that depended on it. It wasn’t a bad theory. Ransom had helped me figure out my computer well enough now that I’d researched the history of Atropa’s Poison. It was a drug developed for war. Alphas were resilient to some of the worst chemical warfare, and their primary weakness, Agritox, was a reactive compound, and thus confined to physical forms like bullets. The compound, because of its unpredictable nature, posed challenges in large-scale production for warfare, requiring advanced facilities and expertise.
But Atropa’s Poison could be used as a gas and, instead of killing alphas, turned them on each other. It was a way to take out enemy packs on the front line, not only neutralising the effects of aura-steroids banned by the Geneva Convention for front line use—but turning those very alphas against their own.
It wasn’t at all far-fetched that the tests were weapons-based and were trialling alpha resiliency to different drugs or stressors. It would also explain their desire for alphas from the Cimmerian Vaults, as those might be in line with alphas on the front line if illegal steroids had been used. Their top theory was that the Lincoln pack were perhaps involved in funding to get the first claim of a drug that would make their auras stronger.
It wasn’t a terrible theory. And alpha auras were connected with one another when they were in a pack.
Were they trying to find a way to… to replicate that outside of a pack? To take the strength of one alpha and give it to another?
Yet, the more I considered the tests, the less sense the theories made. The testing had been erratic. Umbra had been picked over and over again. He’d convinced them to take him instead of Dusk, but his repeated selection made it an unreliable benchmark.
I didn’t think that they were intending to get stable data.
It didn’t seem as though their pack was being measured at all. Rather, they were the ones being tested—pushed and pulled in one way or another.
To what, though? I had no idea, but I was close to a breakthrough. I could feel it. I’d been scouring texts on omegas balancing packs and how it worked.
I wasn’t there yet; I didn’t have answers, but from everything I understood about omega-alpha relations, my role was important.
I was an anchor in the pack.
There was a chance, if a solution presented itself, I may be the centre of that.
It was the part I would never say to Dusk.
Already, people thought so little of me at the Academy—outside of Roxy and my pack. I’d tried over and over to fit in, to be what they wanted me to be, and I’d failed.
And I’d found love anyway. My pack and my friend, they wanted me as I was.
Roxy settled on a stunning velvet dress in the same rich blue, and then it was my turn. I stood, crossing to the rack and lifting the daring black dress from it.
I didn’t think I was going to take long.
This had to be the one.
It was the scariest thing I’d ever done, opening the curtain for Roxy to see me once I had managed to get it on, glad to find it was a perfect fit.
As I expected, her eyes went wide, face blanching. I braced for the worst, and yet as her gaze traced each mark across my chest and arm, the bites that the dress didn’t hide, I realised the truth I’d been hoping for when it came to my scars—one I could never have known until this moment. It was a truth that no one else knew—not even Roxy.
