The Alpha Who Tried to Unmate Me

Chapter 14 – Echoes in the Dark

The dark hit like a fist.

One instant, flickering fluorescents. The next, black so thick my human eyes were useless. My wolf’s vision tried to kick in, only to slam into the suppression bruise on my wrist and the faint, cloying residue of old wards.

“Daxen?” I snapped. “Ishan?”

A soft curse to my left. “Here,” Daxen said. Metal rasped as he drew his knife. “Verrek?”

“Online,” Ishan’s voice came from somewhere behind me. Too calm. “Lights were cut at the breaker, not a local switch. That wasn’t us.”

No kidding.

The air vibrated with something more than sound. An aural pressure, like standing too close to an amplifier made of bone and old pain.

“You feel that?” I whispered.

Daxen’s answer was a low growl.

The voice slipped through it. Not in the air—along the seams of my old bond, through scar tissue.

“Template,” Selyne breathed. “You came back to the table. Brave.”

I swallowed hard. “Come into the room if you’re going to monologue,” I said. “Talking in my head is rude.”

A soft, humorless laugh brushed the inside of my skull. “You think this is in your head?”

Something moved at the edge of my awareness—too light for footsteps, too heavy to be imagination. My wolf strained toward it and recoiled at the same time.

Hands. Metal. The sting of a needle sliding into my vein. Somewhere, a monitor screaming a flatline that wasn’t mine.

I flinched. The memory wasn’t mine.

“Stay out,” I hissed, fingers digging into the table to anchor myself. “You don’t get to use me like they did.”

“They used both of us,” Selyne said. Her tone sharpened, losing some of its eerie float. “That’s the point.”

“Where are you?” Daxen demanded, voice cutting through the psychic haze. “Show yourself.”

Silence for a heartbeat. Then the faintest tap of claws on concrete behind us.

Daxen pivoted, knife up. I forced my eyes to shift, pushing through the ache. The darkness lightened to a grainy grayscale. The room resolved: table, walls, bolts—and a shadow in the doorway that wasn’t ours.

She leaned against the frame like she’d grown out of it. Human form, or close to it. Lean, almost gaunt, hair hanging in wild waves around a face that might once have been pretty in the way sharpened glass is pretty. Her eyes, in the washed‑out spectrum of my wolf sight, burned too bright.

The worst part was the smell.

My scent, wrong. Doubled and distorted. Pine and iron and chamomile souring into something feral. Underneath it, the jagged, icy trace I was starting to recognize as Selyne.

Daxen’s stance tightened. “Hold.”

He said it to me as much as to himself.

Selyne’s head tilted. “Beta Rull,” she said. Her voice in the air sounded like sandpaper dragged over silk. “Always so dutiful. They sent you to fetch their favorite experiment?”

I shoved my wolf down and straightened. “Last I checked, no one owned me anymore.”

She smiled at that. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. “You think walking out of their labs made you free? They stitched you into the system, template. Your scent. Your scars. They carried you into every ritual after you left.”

The words landed like blows. I didn’t let them knock me off center.

“I read your file,” I said. “Varra, Selyne. Rerouting failed. Severance unstable. Authorization for termination.”

Something in her eyes flickered. “Of course they wrote it that way. Monsters always tell the story from their angle.”

Behind me, I felt Ishan shift. “We’re not here to fight you,” he said. “We’re here to shut them down.”

Her gaze flicked over him, dismissive. “Little data‑wolf. They built the cage you tidy. You don’t get to talk about shutting it down.”

Daxen eased a fraction closer to me. Protective instinct, old as any pack law.

Selyne noticed. Her lips curled.

“You kept her,” she said to him. “Even after they tore her out of your alpha. You walked her back into the city that broke her, and now you hold her leash while they hang her scent on corpses.”

Anger flared hot enough to burn through the fear.

“No one’s holding my leash,” I snapped. “And no one told you to paint me over your kills.”

Her laugh scraped my nerves raw. “You think I care about their dead? I care that they see what they made. You. Me. The ones who didn’t survive enough to scratch their names into the floor.”

Her gaze flicked to the gouges by the wall. The almost‑L I’d seen under the dust.

I forced myself to meet her eyes. “You were trying to write my name.”

“I was trying,” she said softly, “to remember I wasn’t alone.”

Something twisted in my chest. For a second, the room blurred—mine and hers overlapping. Two wolves on two tables, bonds screaming.

Daxen’s fingers brushed my elbow. Grounding. “Liora,” he murmured. “We need to go. This place is compromised.”

Selyne’s attention snapped back to him. The air tightened.

“You’re not leaving yet,” she said.

In the distance, faint but growing, I heard sirens. Human. Wrong timing, wrong direction.

Ishan’s tablet vibrated against his chest. He glanced down, eyes narrowing.

“Problem?” I asked, not looking away from Selyne.

“Multiple patrol units redirected to this block,” he said. “From Vaelir and city. None of them by our call.”

Selyne’s smile turned knife‑sharp. “They’re coming,” she crooned. “To see their template in her natural habitat.”

She took one step back into the corridor and dissolved into shadow, scent trailing like a taunt.

Daxen swore. “We’re leaving. Now.”

I hesitated, just long enough to lay my palm flat on the cold metal of the table that had once held someone else down in my stolen skin.

“We’re not done,” I whispered—to Selyne, to the ghosts, to the program that thought we were theirs.

Then I turned and ran with the others, sirens wailing closer, every echo in the dark screaming that we were already three moves behind.