Page 4 of Untamed

Soft voices have said worse things right before hands closed around me. Easy while straps tightened. You’re all right while needles went in. Good when teeth broke the skin of my neck and I could not get my wrists free.

The Alpha takes one breath, and I see his chest move. I hit him before he gets another.

My shoulder drives him into the bars hard enough to make the whole gate shudder. He grunts, pain bursting sharp in his scent as I come down over him, and I snap for the thick muscle between his neck and shoulder. My teeth catch fabric instead. It tears. My claws rake across his ribs when he twists, blood warming beneath them, but he still does not hit me.

That makes no sense, so I strike again because I know what Alphas do once they have you pinned and I am not waiting for him to remember.

“Stop.” He catches both sides of my chest, not forcing me down, only keeping my teeth away from his throat while the bars dig into his back. His breath comes rough now. Blood runs hot through the fur along my foreleg where I opened him. “Orion, look at me. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Liar. My paw catches his forearm on the next swipe. More blood. Outside the cage, boots scrape and voices rise over one another, fast enough that I cannot separate the words until one cuts through everything else.

“Control him, Maddox! Establish dominance or we end the test!”

The word rips the cage out from under me. Leather crushes my wrists into metal. Something cold holds my jaw while an Alpha leans over me, his breath against my neck, and somebody beyond the table says good when I stop fighting hard enough to move the restraints. I smell my own blood before I feel the teeth. There are hands everywhere and nowhere I can put mine.

The memory breaks apart when the man under me shifts and I see where his eyes have dropped. My neck. I lunge harder before he can reach for the scar, but his hands stay where they are against my chest. Whatever anger I expected to find in his face is gone, replaced by something that makes even less sense.

“I’m not touching your neck.” He says it slowly, like he can see exactly where I went. Instead of trying to use the opening, he lowers himself against the bars until I have to lower with him or give up my hold. “Look past me, Orion. Look at the gate.”

I don't want to, but a click snaps somewhere behind him, then another, and black rifle muzzles start lifting beyond the bars.

My paw lashes out on instinct. He catches my foreleg before the claws reach his face, both hands closing around it while I wrench against him. One of my long front digits ends up trapped between his palms. The drugs make the cage tilt when I pull too hard.

“Maddox, bite him!” someone shouts. “Now, or we clear the cage!”

The Alpha looks at the guns instead of my neck, and his scent changes so suddenly I stop fighting for one beat.

Anger rolls off him, hot and violent, but none of it is aimed at me. He drags my paw closer before I understand what he is doing, catches the trapped digit more securely between his hands, and bends his head.

His teeth break skin, and pain flashes clean through the drugged fog. I roar and jerk hard enough to slam him back into the bars again, but he has already let go. No teeth buried in my neck. No mouth holding me down. Just blood welling through fur at one finger and his hands opening immediately around it.

Nothing happens immediately. Then heat crawls up my arm, and I go still when the screaming in my head recedes with it.

Not gone. Just shoved farther away, as though something has opened between us and given all that panic somewhere else to go. The Alpha sucks in a breath, and pain catches under my own ribs where there is no wound. I stare down at him. He has one arm wrapped over his side now, blood darkening the torn fabric there, and the ache under my ribs pulses with it.

The ache is his. The realization barely forms before something else follows through the same strange opening. Anger first, still pointed past me toward the rifles. Then guilt, heavy enough to make my throat tighten. Beneath both sits something so fierce and simple I almost mistake it for one of my own instincts.

They are not hurting him. The certainty lands hard enough that I barely register my legs giving out beneath me.

I hit the concrete hard enough that my jaw knocks against the floor, muzzle ending inches from his boots. The Alpha releases my paw completely and drops beside me instead of trying to hold me there. He is breathing through his teeth now, one hand pressed to the claw marks in his ribs while the other stays flat on the floor where I can see it.

“That was the smallest fucking bite I could manage,” he says after a moment. His voice has gone rough around the edges. “You can hate me for it when you’re not full of enough sedative to drop a horse.”

I blow a hard breath through my nose because this mouth cannot give him the answer I want. His mouth moves at one corner before pain from his ribs cuts through that strange new connection and flattens it again. He leaves the expression there without reaching for me.

Metal shifts outside the cage, and the first turn of the lock sends every muscle I still control rigid. The Alpha feels it. I know he does because his head snaps toward me at the same moment panic tears through my chest, and something presses back through the thin place between us—not a command, not even a full thought. A sensation more than a word. His attention on the opening. His anger pointed outward. The absolute absence of fear directed at me.

My mind reaches for a word and comes up with safe, though it doesn't feel like language so much as the shape of what he's pushing back at me. I stare at him, and the surprise on his face tells me he felt the exchange too. Then the gate opens and rifles fill the gap before any person does.

I drag myself upright on legs that still shake and step between the weapons and the Alpha. The nearest guard advances, and a growl rolls out of me low enough to vibrate through the concrete. I plant myself more firmly in front of the man whose blood is still drying under my claws.

“Control your animal, Maddox. Leash him or we will.”

The guard tries to make the threat sound steady, but it cracks on the last word. Behind me, the Alpha pushes himself to his feet. I feel the pull in his ribs before I hear his breath catch, and one of his hands presses briefly to his side. When he steps up beside me, leather and blood fill the space at my shoulder.

“Call him an animal again,” he says, voice low enough that nobody has to wonder whether he means it, “and you’ll have a bigger problem than the bear.”

Chapter Four