The Feral Alpha King's Unwanted Guide

Chapter 4

Harper

I woke up to someone shaking my shoulder.

Not gently. The kind of shake that said get up or I'll make you, which, rude. My brain was still three layers deep in sleep, and through the blur I registered warm skin, hard muscle, and the fact that whoever was looming over me was very shirtless and very close.

My half-conscious brain decided this was still a dream, filed the abs under "nice," and burrowed deeper.

That lasted about four seconds.

The blanket tightened around me. Then the sofa disappeared from under my body. The world tilted, my stomach lurched, and suddenly I was horizontal over someone's shoulder like a rolled-up carpet, bouncing with each step as he walked.

"Hey. Hey!"

He didn't answer. A door opened. Cold tile met my back as he set me down on the bathroom floor, still cocooned in the blanket like the world's most undignified burrito.

He looked down at me. Amber eyes. Zero expression.

"Five minutes."

The door shut.

I sat on the bathroom floor, blinking, tangled in a blanket, trying to reassemble the last twelve hours of my life.

Right. I wasn't in my old bunk anymore. I was in the luxury suite of Camp 07's most dangerous Sentinel, who had claimed the bedroom last night without a word, leaving me to spend seven hours on a sofa that was admittedly nicer than my old mattress but still a sofa. I'd lain there counting ceiling tiles, replaying every survival statistic I knew about humans paired with unstable Alphas, and at some point I must have passed out from sheer emotional exhaustion.

And now I was on his bathroom floor because apparently my new roommate had the interpersonal skills of a drill sergeant crossed with a forklift.

Cool. Great. Living the dream.

________

The briefing room was nothing like the supply closets I was used to.

Long metal table, wall-mounted holo-screens, and every seat filled with Sentinels and Guides ranked B and above. The kind of people who looked like they'd been bred in a lab for combat.

Then there was us. The seven-foot Alpha in a collar walking in like he owned the building, and the E-class girl two steps behind him trying not to trip over her own boots.

Every head turned. I felt the stares land on my badge first, then crawl to his collar, then snap back to me with expressions ranging from disbelief to something closer to pity.

He didn't seem to notice. Or care. He dropped into a seat with the posture of someone who'd sat at the head of tables his whole life. I slid in beside him and pretended not to feel the stares.

A woman stood at the far end of the table. She wasn't in uniform. Lab coat, tablet in hand, black hair pulled into a knot so tight it could've been structural. She didn't look up when we entered. Didn't look up when the room settled. Just kept reading her screen like the rest of us were background noise in her private experiment.

"Dr. Sherman," an officer announced. "Head of Bond Research."

"Sentinel Vane and Guide Ellis." Her voice was cool, precise, aimed somewhere between us. "Your bond registered S-class resonance at pairing. Unprecedented for an E-class Guide. As of today, your case falls under my research jurisdiction."

Vane. So that was his name.

She swiped her tablet. "First assessment: Rogue suppression sweep, Outer Sector Three. Three confirmed targets. I'll be monitoring remotely."

Vane's jaw tightened. "She's E-class. Bringing her into a combat zone is a liability."

Sherman's gaze finally lifted. Slate-gray eyes, cold as surgical steel. She looked at Vane the way a researcher looks at a sample that just talked back.

"If you enter the field without your Guide, you'll be reclassified as S-tier threat and returned to confinement. Permanently." No inflection. Just a fact.

The room went quiet. The collar's gem pulsed a warning shade of orange.

Sherman turned to leave. Then she stopped, as if she'd just remembered something minor.

"One more thing. Bond deepening correlates with sensory synchronization frequency between partners. The highest-frequency synchronization events tend to involve… direct physical proximity." A pause, clinical and weightless. "I trust you can interpret the data."

She walked out. The door sealed behind her.

Direct physical proximity. Highest frequency. Interpret the data.

I shoved that thought down so hard it probably left a bruise.

Vane stood, shoved his chair back hard enough to screech against the floor, and walked out. I grabbed my gear and followed.

Somewhere under the irritation and the nerves, watching the stiff line of his back, I felt something I didn't expect.

He'd rather die than go back to that cell. I understood that more than I wanted to.

________

Sector Three was a graveyard of shipping containers, stacked three high and stretching in every direction like a rust-colored maze. The kind of place where sound bounced wrong and shadows moved on their own.

Vane was thirty meters ahead before I'd cleared the first row.

Direct physical proximity. Right. At this rate, the only thing syncing up was my cardio and his complete disregard for it.

I jogged to keep up, one hand on the sidearm I'd never actually fired, eyes sweeping every gap between containers. It had been months since I'd been outside the inner perimeter. The things that hid in places exactly like this—feral and fast and so far gone that the only mercy left was a clean kill.

A shape exploded from behind a container to our left.

Rogue. Massive, feral, all matted fur and exposed teeth and eyes that were nothing but red. It lunged at Vane with a shriek that echoed off metal.

Vane caught it mid-air.

One hand on its throat, pivot, slam. The Rogue hit the ground so hard the container beside it shuddered. A single strike to the base of its skull and it went limp. Three seconds, maybe four.

An A-class Sentinel would've taken thirty.

I pressed my back against a container, heart hammering, watching him straighten up and shake blood off his hand like it was rainwater. His breathing hadn't even changed.

Horrible personality. Unreal combat ability. The universe loved its little contradictions.

The second Rogue was bigger. Much bigger. It barreled out from between two stacks with a shriek that made my ears ring, and Vane met it head-on. Claws clashed. Metal screamed. He drove it back once, twice, each blow precise and brutal.

Then something went wrong.

Mid-swing, his whole body locked up. Not a stumble, not a flinch. A full-system freeze, like someone had yanked the power cord. His arm hung in the air. His eyes went wide and glassy. The Rogue's next swipe caught him across the shoulder, and he barely twisted away in time.

Sensory overload. I'd read about it in the Guide training manual—the chapter I'd skimmed because I never thought it would apply to me. When a Sentinel's senses spike past their threshold, everything floods in at once. Every sound, every smell, every nerve ending firing simultaneously. The only way to pull them back was through the bond.

"Link. Now." His voice was a ragged snarl through gritted teeth.

I closed my eyes, reached out with whatever it was inside me that had lit up in that cell, and pushed my awareness toward him.

I expected warmth. A channel. Something I could slide into.

What I hit was a wall.

Iron-cold, glass-smooth, sealed shut without a single crack. Behind it, I could feel him. Distant, muffled, like hearing someone shout through ten feet of water. But I couldn't reach him.

I pushed harder. The wall didn't budge. My mental reach bounced back like a rubber band, and pain spiked behind my eyes so sharp I stumbled sideways into a container.

"What are you doing?" His voice came strained and furious between the sounds of him fighting half-blind.

"I'm trying!"

"Try harder!"

I slammed into the wall again. And again. Each time like trying to hug someone through bulletproof glass. I could sense the shape of him, the heat of him, but every attempt just skidded off.

I opened my eyes to tell him I couldn't, I didn't know how, something was wrong.

But I saw the third Rogue had circled wide, scaling the containers from the blind side—already mid-leap, claws out, jaws wide, aimed straight at Vane's exposed back.