The Alpha's Only Cure

The Hunger

Chapter 3:

Damian's POV

The chains were rated for forty tons.

I had broken the last set at thirty eight.

Marcus had ordered a new pair four days ago. Thicker links this time, reinforced steel, bolted into the concrete at four anchor points instead of two. I stood at the doorway and looked at them for a long time before I went in. Long enough for Marcus to clear his throat behind me, which was the closest he ever came to saying hurry up.

I went in.

He locked the first cuff around my left wrist and I looked at the wall while he worked. The bunker was twelve floors below the Kross Global building, soundproofed, temperature controlled, built under the pretense of a server maintenance room. Three people in the world knew what it was actually used for. Marcus was one of them.

The second cuff clicked shut.

"Rolan stopped by your office today," Marcus said, without looking up from the lock.

"I know."

"He spent forty minutes in the genetics division."

I looked at him. He was checking the anchor bolts, his back to me, voice deliberately casual in the way it got when he was saying something he knew I was not going to like.

"Which staff?" I asked.

"The new transfers." A pause. "He spent most of the time at Vance's station."

I said nothing. Marcus finished checking the bolts, straightened himself and looked at me with an expression I did not want to see on his face. Eleven years as my beta and he still thought his face was difficult to read.

"I'll be outside," he said.

"You always are," I replied.

The door closed behind him and I was alone.

I should tell you about Rolan Voss.

He was in Phase 2. Had been for eight months, though he had told no one except me and I also haven't told anyone. He was direct and had always been loyal to me. I had kept him close for eleven years for exactly that reason.

Phase 2 meant the burning had started, the senses were degrading but slowly, one frequency at a time. It meant the hunger was present but still manageable, something a disciplined man could contain for now.

I knew what Phase 2 felt like. I had lived in it.

The difference between Rolan and I was that I had a bunker, forty tons of chain and eleven years of practice holding Bane back from the edge, Rolan had none of it.

PROBLEM.

Bane hit the inside of my skull and I breathed through it. In, out, slow.

"Not yet," I said.

PROBLEM NOW. DEAL WITH IT.

"I am aware."

The burning started at eleven forty.

It always started around the same time, like my body had put it in the calendar. A heat at the base of my skull, spreading down my spine, into my chest. It always started slow, but the pain came later, my palms split. Four punctures on each hand, claws pushing through whether I wanted them to or not. I stopped looking at them a long time ago.They healed within the hour.

FALLING APART.

"Yes," I said.

BURNING. EMPTY.

"I know."

There was no point arguing with Bane about the facts. The facts were the facts. Two years of Phase 3 and the world had gone progressively dark around me, sense by sense. My smell had gone first, then the sharper frequencies of sound. My vision was still intact but the depth of it had changed, it seemed like I was looking at everything through glass.

The specialists had given me eighteen months. That had been eight months ago.

I did not think about the math.

FIND IT.

And there it was. The thing Bane had been circling since two nights ago.

FIND IT. THE THING FROM THE LAB. FIND IT.

"I am working on it," I said.

NOT FAST ENOUGH.

I pulled against the chains. The anchor bolts groaned. I stopped and breathed.

Two nights ago, my team had raided BioVance Laboratories on a standard corporate intelligence operation. I had walked into the lab myself, which I did not always do, and I could not have told you why I did it that night. Instinct. Bane pulling in a direction without explanation, which was not unusual. I had learned to follow it.

I was in the middle of the lab when the noise stopped.

The burning had been constant inside my head for two complete years. Every second of every day, without a break. And then in that lab, without any warning, it just stopped. Like someone had reached in and turned it off. I stood there and did not move because honestly I did not know what to do with the quiet. Bane went completely still inside my head.

Four seconds total, maybe five.

Then it was gone and the burning came back harder than before and I had turned around and found her crouched behind a workstation, collar pulled to her jaw, eyes fixed on the wall behind my shoulder. She breathed so carefully it was almost not breathing at all.

I had leaned in because Bane had screamed at me to, and because in eleven years of running this pack, I had learned that the moments that did not make sense were always the moments that mattered most.

I had inhaled and caught the very edge of something that disappeared before I could hold onto it. But those few seconds while it lasted, the burning stopped. Then it came back and swallowed everything again like it had never left.

HER. IT IS HER.

"You don't know that," I had said then.

I was less sure of that now.

She had sat in my boardroom that morning and said as little as she could get away with. Her hands were steady, she sat straight back, and looked at me like there was something she was trying to hide underneath her gaze.

I had seen nervous people before, scared people even and those trying to impress me or manipulate me. She was none of those things.

She was hiding something. Had been for a long time. You could tell by how good she was at it.

MINE.

"Stop."

ALREADY MINE. BEFORE SHE KNOWS IT.

"That is not how this works."

IT IS EXACTLY HOW THIS WORKS.

The burning hit its peak at half past midnight.

Bane threw himself against the walls of my mind and my vision whited out. I pulled against the chains without meaning to and the anchor bolts screamed in the concrete. I came back to myself with both palms bleeding and my forehead pressed against the cold floor.

I stayed down. It was cooler there.

The left anchor bolt was coming loose and a slow groan of steel pulling away from concrete. I could hear it. Bane heard it too.

BREAK IT. FINISH IT.

"No."

BREAK IT AND GO FIND—

And then my mind went to her, not deliberately. It just went there.

The burning dropped.

Not enough to matter, but enough that Bane stopped throwing himself at the walls and started pacing instead.

I lay on the concrete while my eyes stared at the ceiling and thought about her.

A woman on the third floor of my building with a secret she had clearly been hiding for a very long time. Long enough that it had become second nature to her.

I thought about the four seconds in the lab and what they meant. Two years of constant burning and then silence, the moment I got close to her.

Tomorrow I would move her station to somewhere I'll be able to keep my eyes on her.

GOOD, Bane said.

It was the first time in two years we had agreed on anything.