The Alpha's Siphon

CHAPTER THREE

Zia

The contract is still on the nightstand when I wake up.

I had half-hoped it would be gone. That the night would have swallowed it, or that I would wake up in Jonas’s basement with the familiar smell of damp stone and the rectangle of pewter sky telling me none of this had happened yet. Instead I get white linen and morning light and the thin black folder sitting exactly where I left it, patient as a verdict.

I sit up slowly. My ribs ache from yesterday’s fall. I press two fingers against the bruise blooming beneath the oversized shirt I found in the closet and breathe through it the pain.

The room is large and silent and aggressively clean. There’s a tray on the small table near the window. Someone came in while I slept. Brought tea, fruit, a folded cloth napkin. I eat because I need to, not because I’m hungry. I need everything I can give my body before a session and something tells me I won’t be given long to prepare.

I’m right.

Renna knocks at seven fifty-three.

“Child, Alpha Garrick will see you at eight,” she says when I open the door. Her expression is the same as yesterday. She’s too professional like someone who has learned to keep their reactions very small in this house. “His study is on the second floor. I’ll take you.”

“Of course he will,” I say.

Renna doesn’t respond to that. Smart woman. She seems to be the one with a soul around here.

I have a ritual.

Jonas drilled it into me when I was fifteen and I have never once skipped it. I go through it now in the hallway outside the session room while Renna waits with the patient stillness of someone paid to witness things and say nothing about them.

Breathe in. Four counts. Feel the edges of the walls inside me, the architecture Jonas built and I have spent years reinforcing, layer by layer, dark thing by dark thing. Thirty-seven deposits compressed behind my ribs like stones in a jar. I check each wall the way you check a door before a storm. Looking for softness. For anything yesterday may have loosened.

The walls hold. Barely thinner than usual. I can work with that.

Breathe out.

Renna watches me with a really keen expression. There’s the professional wall cracking.

I pull on my gloves. Then I take them off again. The removal is the ritual, the moment of deliberate choice. I am choosing to do this. I am choosing to open the door. It helps, sometimes, to make the involuntary feel voluntary.

Sometimes.

“I’m ready,” I tell Renna. I thin my lips.

She opens the door.

Heavy curtains in his study room shut out the world, and the air smelled faintly of leather and ink. Nothing was out of place. Tall shelves climbed the walls, filled with history books and artifacts. Behind a wide desk, a huge chair faced the door like a throne. I’m guessing that’s the devil’s favorite chair and he loves it so much because it’s sitting on it and stroking the armrest as I speak.

He’s dressed today. Dark shirt, dark trousers, sleeves rolled to the elbow. He watches me cross the room. Says nothing.

He gestured at Renna, dismissing her.

It’s just me and him now.

I sit in the opposite chair. I set my hands on my knees, palms up, the way I always begin. My posture matters. It tells the body what to expect. It makes my service feel like an offer rather than a demand.

“Before we begin,” I say, “I need to know how long it’s been since your last release.”

Something shifts at the corner of his jaw.

“That’s not your concern.”

“It determines how much pressure I’m managing from the first contact. It is entirely my concern.” I hold his gaze. “When was the last time someone filtered your Rage?”

A pause. Long enough that I think he won’t answer.

“Eight months,” he says.

Eight months.

I keep my face still.

Eight months of accumulated Rage in a wolf of his age and power. In anyone else that would be catastrophic —the kind of pressure that breaks things, that bleeds into decision-making and bleeds into violence.

This explains why he bought a permanent contract instead of a session.

“All right,” I say. I turn my hands over. “Give me your wrists.”

He looks at my hands for a moment. Then he leans forward and places his wrists across my palms.

I reach out and wrap my cold fingers around his wrist.

The Rage hits me like a wall.

Not the slow manageable tide I’m used to from smaller wolves. This is instantaneous and totally vast and ancient, hitting my internal walls the way a wave hits sand. Not breaking through cleanly but destabilizing everything underneath, finding every crack I didn’t know existed.

Hold, I tell myself. Redirect. Build.

Then something else happens. Something that has never happened before.

The darkness I already carry—thirty-seven wolves worth of rage and rot compressed behind my ribs for years—feels his Rage arriving and wakes up. Like it has been sleeping and something finally knocked loud enough. All that stored power begins pressing outward against my walls from the inside at the exact same moment his Rage presses inward from the outside.

I am the wall between two storms.

And the wall is cracking.

I wrench my hand back with a gasp.

The room snaps into focus. I press my hand flat against my sternum, feeling the darkness inside settle reluctantly like disturbed water finding its level.

Beside me, Garrick has gone still. His eyes are doing something I didn’t expect. Uncertainty lurks in them. The look of a man who has spent his entire life being the most dangerous thing in any room and has just encountered something his instincts don’t have a category for.

“What just happened?” He asks. His arm is still stretched out.

Here is what I know and will not tell him: The darkness I carry recognizes his Rage. Not the way a cure recognizes a disease. The way a fire recognizes fuel.

“The first session is always an adjustment,” I say. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

He watches me for a long moment.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

I nod and turn away before he can see what is happening behind my eyes.

I feel something in my chest that isn’t the weight of thirty-seven wolves.

I already know what it is, and it’s lethal to us both.