The Alpha's Siphon

CHAPTER FOUR

Garrick

I am not a man who gets unsettled.

I told myself that at midnight, standing at the window of my study with a glass of whiskey I hadn’t touched. I told myself that again at two in the morning, when I was still standing there. I am still telling myself that now, in the grey early light of the following day, because apparently repetition is the only strategy I have left.

The lady unsettles me.

I will not say it again, even inside my own head. I am noting it the way I note any unexpected variable in a controlled operation clinically, and then I am moving past it.

I send for Renna and have her bring me the file Jonas sent with the transport wolves.

It contains everything he claims to know about the siphon’s ability, her sessions, and her history. Her name—Zia Onyx—sits in the header like a fact I should have already known. The Onyx bloodline has a long history of witchcraft.

Jonas is a businessman who has spent years monetizing something he barely understands. His notes are thorough on the practical. The session duration, recovery time, absorption limits. Almost entirely silent on the mechanism. On what actually happens inside her when she takes Rage in.

I read the section on failed sessions three times.

Two wolves before me. Both with significantly progressed Rage. Both described as—Jonas’s word—turbulent. Both wolves left intact.

Neither description mentions what happened to her.

I close the file. Then I open it again, because the thing I am looking for isn’t there, and I cannot determine if that is because Jonas doesn’t know or because Jonas chose not to include it.

What I am looking for is whether what happened yesterday was something she did deliberately.

I was there. I felt the transfer begin—the pull of it, my Rage moving toward her the way it always wants to move. And then something shifted. Something came back. Not my Rage returning; it was something with weight and age and density that had no business being part of a routine transfer.

She pulled her hand back before I could identify it.

Then she looked at me with those tremulous blue eyes and said the first session is always an adjustment, in a voice so measured it could have been rehearsed.

I have interrogated enough people to know the difference between someone who is surprised and someone pretending to be. She was neither. She wasn’t contained. I heard the way her heart pulsated. It drummed harsher than it did when she peered up at me upon her arrival.

Which means she knew more than she told me.

She’s dishonest, and I don’t tolerate that from my generals.

I set the file down. Then I think about the last time I sat across from a Siphon. The thought surfaces slowly. Could this be the same story as the last? Someone dying at the cost of redeeming me?

I push it back where it belongs. Into the dark at the back of everything.

It goes quietly. It always comes back.

I bring Zia to my study at midday.

She sits across from me without being invited to. Folds her hands on the table.

I listened to her heartbeat. It’s quite stable now.

The silver scars on her palms catch the light. The shadows beneath her eyes speak of a night spent the same way mine was—not sleeping. Recalibrating.

“What happened yesterday,” I say, “was not an adjustment.”

“No,” she agrees. “It wasn’t.”

I had expected deflection. The agreement stops me for precisely one second.

“Then what was it?”

Not a question. She hears the difference.

“Something I need to understand better before I can explain it to you.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It’s the only honest one I have.”

She does not fidget, does not fill the silence, does not do any of the things people do when sitting across from me and feeling the weight of that.

“Then we have nothing further to discuss,” I say, and stand.

Something crosses her face quickly. The involuntary response of someone who did not expect the conversation to end.

Good. Let her feel the cost of withholding.

“Wait,” she says.

I remain standing. I do not sit back down. She is going to give me what I asked for, or she is going to understand that my patience is not a resource she can draw on indefinitely.

“The Rage doesn’t transfer cleanly because of what I’m already carrying,” she says, more carefully now. “I have thirty-seven wolves’ worth of stored Rage behind my ribs. In three years, it has never responded to an incoming transfer. Yesterday—” She stops. Starts again. “Yesterday, it woke up. Your Rage and mine recognized each other. If I hadn’t pulled back, the walls containing it would have failed.”

I sit back down.

“And if the walls fail?”

“Everything I’ve ever absorbed comes out at once.” A pause. “No Siphon has ever reached that point and remained functional enough to report it.”

I sit with the full shape of what she has just told me. It’s not the Jonas version. It’s the actual thing, given because I forced the cost of withholding.

I note that she gave it under pressure, not willingly. I file that away.

“We will try again this evening,” I say. “Shorter duration. You set the limit, you enforce it. The moment something shifts, you pull back.”

“And if it shifts immediately?”

“Then we stop immediately.” I hold her gaze. “I am not interested in a dead Siphon. I am interested in a solution.”

Something crosses her features—genuine surprise, gone almost before it arrives. As though being treated as a solution rather than an expendable resource is a concept her face doesn’t have a practiced response for.

She recovers quickly. The armor goes back up.

I notice both things.

She arrives at seven.

The treeline beyond the window has gone dark. Renna has posted herself in the corridor outside, the way she does when something requires managing.

Zia sits beside me. Back straight. Already building her walls—I can see the effort of it in the deliberateness of her breathing, the particular stillness she inhabits before contact.

I strip off my robe.

I have my briefs on.

“Five minutes,” she says. “If I say stop, you release my hand immediately.”

“Agreed.”

“Garrick.” She says my name without the title. My eyes go to her face. “If it happens again, hold still. Whatever you feel, contain it. Any instinctive response from you will accelerate the reaction inside me.”

“Understood.”

She reaches out and wraps her cold fingers around my wrist.

The Rage moves toward her immediately. Faster than yesterday. I feel it leaving, the familiar reduction behind my ribs.

Then the darkness inside her wakes up.

I feel it through the contact point—something vast and densely compressed stirring beneath her skin, the way you feel a tremor through the floor before you hear anything. My Rage reaches it.

And the world ignites.

Both forces surge toward each other simultaneously—feeding instead of canceling, building in a loop faster than either of us can process. The heat slams my chest. Internal, cellular. The sensation of something burning from the inside out.

Hold still.

Beside me, Zia makes a sound low in her throat. Someone maintaining control by the thinnest possible margin.

“Zia—”

“Hold—” Her voice fractures. “Hold still—”

The heat doubles. Then doubles again. I have been shot, broken, and burned in eleven days of war. None of it compares to this. My vision goes white at the edges.

I hold still.

She screams abruptly.

The door hits the wall before the sound finishes.

Renna crosses the room in three strides and wrenches our contact apart with the full force of a combat-trained wolf. The severance is instantaneous like being torn out by the roots.

The heat collapses inward and dies.

I am on my feet before I know I am moving.

Zia is still on the sofa. Not screaming. Convulsing—small, violent tremors, hands pressed flat against her sternum, face the color of old ash. Her lips moving, but no sound coming out.

“Get out,” I tell Renna.

“Alpha—”

“Out!”

She goes.

I drop to my knees and take Zia’s face in both hands, angling it toward me. Her eyes are open but doing something I don’t have a word for. She’s present and not present simultaneously.

“Look at me.” My voice is low and steady. The voice I once used the night I held my daughter in the pool of her own blood. She looks frail like my late daughter right now, and it brings haunting memories. “Zia, f*****g look at me!”

Her eyes slowly find mine. The tremulous and bloodshot.

I hold her face in place. Searching for soothing words, but even the word ‘soothing’ is in my head, long consumed by the same rage I’m trying to eliminate with her help.

She exhales sharply. Her weight shifts forward. I catch her before she reaches the floor, and then she is in my arms, breathing like someone surfacing from deep water, and the room is very quiet.

“What happened, Zia?” I ask.

Her shaky fingers find my arm and clutch it, verifying that something solid exists.

“I’ve reached my limit point, sir.” Her voice is barely a sound. “The darkness I carry has been compressing for three years. Your Rage doesn’t just interact with it—it calls to it. Every time we make contact, the reaction will be faster. Stronger.”

“And,” I say. Because there is an and. I can hear its shape.

She tilts her head back to look at me. Her eyes are clearer now, the armor returning, piece by piece, even here.

“If we continue, there is a point past which neither of us survives the session.”

The room holds that.

I look at the silver scars on her hand. They’re so evident.

“There’s another way, and you’ll figure it out,” I say.

Her lips press into a thin line.

“I’m afraid there may not be any way, Garrick.”