My Assigned Alpha

Broadcast

Aurora pov

The orderlies came at seven with a wheelchair I didn't need and a hand on my elbow that made clear what I needed didn't matter.

The mark was still cold. I walked with my palm pressed over it, down a corridor with no windows and doors with no handles, past the wolf in the glass booth who tracked my shoulder instead of my face. The building hummed in a key I couldn't name. Something behind the walls ran all night and never stopped running.

Same exam room as before, except the machines were awake. Screens in a row, green and breathing. A chair bolted to the floor with straps on the arms that nobody mentioned.

The doctor was already there, thin glasses, sleeves rolled, stale coffee on his breath. "Gown," he said, and threw it at me. Paper. Stiff. Cut open down the back.

I peeled out of the scrubs myself. Nobody helped, and I decided to count that as mercy. The gown covered everything except the one part of me they wanted, and every time I moved it slid off the crescent like it had been measured for that.

He wired me without ceremony. Node at the forehead. Two at the temples, cold gel, a hiss of contact. One pressed flat over the sternum until the bone complained. The last went over the mark, and when the pad touched the crescent the skin under it flinched, a small animal moving under a hand.

"Lie back. Don't move. Don't talk."

Behind the glass the lights came up. The director stood with her arms folded and watched me the way you watch a lock once you've found the key.

"Begin," she said. Her voice arrived from a speaker above the chair, close enough to feel on my scalp.

"Attempt one." The doctor pressed a key.

The sound came first. A wire struck inside my skull, one long note that wouldn't end. My back teeth ached. Copper flooded my mouth. The crescent went from cold to colder, cold all the way into the bone, and I heard myself make a noise I hadn't authorized.

On the screens, the green lines spiked. Every one of them.

The doctor kept his hand on the key. "That's not—" He leaned in. "That's not suppression."

"Read it."

"Amplitude's up eleven percent. Same frequency." He wiped his glasses on his sleeve and put them back on, and looked at the numbers like they'd insulted his mother. "It didn't cancel. It answered."

The director studied the screens without moving. "Then it's a mirror. Invert the inversion."

"Ma'am, the amplitude—"

"Get it." Two fingers lifted off her elbow, a small flick. "The bond shouts loudest when the body is honest, doctor. You know that. Make her honest."

He crossed to the counter and came back with a screen on a rolling arm, angled so I could see it. My own signal, drawn in green. It looked like a hillside. Long, slow climbs, sharp little drops, and one fat spike in the middle where the crescent sat.

"Proximity. Arousal. Fear." He tapped each spike. "Those are the three carriers. We can fake proximity. We can fake fear." He looked up. "Arousal we can't fake. That's the honest one. That's the loud one."

"Say the rest of it."

"We have the wolf's side." He said it to the director, not to me, which was its own kind of cruelty. "Recorded at the claiming. Audio, thermal, the signal trace. Everything the mark did while he had his hands on you."

The paper gown had gone damp between my shoulder blades. "You recorded the ceremony."

"We record everything." He clicked a key. "Try not to enjoy it. The cameras are on."

Adrian's breath came out of the speakers.

That was all, at first. A man breathing, close and low, the exhale he made when he was trying to hold himself in one piece. Then the words from the garden. My blood to her blood. My pack to her keeping. The mark over my shoulder went hot so fast my whole side jerked against the straps.

"There," the doctor said. "Hold that."

Hold it. Easy for a man with a clipboard. Adrian's voice kept going, and my body answered like it had been waiting all night for permission. Heat pooled low and spread slow, the kind that makes a person shift their weight on a chair. My n*****s went tight and hard under the paper, and the paper scratched every time I breathed, and I hated that he could see it, hated that the machines could see it, hated most that it was working.

The pad over the crescent warmed. Skin first, then deeper, then the place behind my ribs where the thread had been cut. Wetness gathered between my legs, unhurried and unmistakable, and when the doctor adjusted something on the rolling arm and my knee slipped, the slick of my thighs made a sound against the vinyl that the room was too quiet to hide.

"Pulse up. Skin temp up. Trace climbing." He was writing with one hand. "Good. Keep going."

I closed my eyes and pulled my knees together, and the pressure of my own thighs dragged over my c**t, and the spike on the screen jumped like something bitten.

"Again."

"Go to hell."

"Not my call." He hit the key and played it again.

Adrian's voice in the speakers, the low part of it, the part he used when there was no one else in the room. You're real. I keep waiting to wake up in that corridor. My p***y clenched on nothing, hard, and stayed clenched, and I felt the ache of it spread up into my belly. The crescent burned. My c**t was swollen and hot and every shift of the paper gown dragged across it, and I was dripping onto their chair, onto their electrode leads, and the green line was climbing like water up a wall.

Somewhere past the flatland, the thread went taut. Not warm. Taut. Like a rope somebody had stepped on at the far end.

I reached for it. Pressed, willed, shoved everything I had down that dead line the way I'd done in the dark of my room. Don't come. It's a trap. Nothing came back. Not even the rattle.

"Flat," the doctor said, disappointed, writing. "No return."

Because reaching goes the wrong way.

The thought arrived whole and I didn't question it. The door in the garden had opened when Adrian pressed blood to mine. Not when I pushed. When he pulled.

So I stopped reaching.

I pulled.

Every screen in the room blew out white. Eight of them, all at once, and the green traces vanished, and for one heartbeat the whole exam room was light and noise and the doctor's clipboard clattered on the floor.

Then the screens came back, and it wasn't data on any of them.

It was Adrian.

Standing in his study with the city behind him, windows black with early light, no tie, shirt sleeves shoved to the elbow. Blood crusted on his knuckles, his hair flat on one side like he'd been awake since the oak tree. Cole and Voss behind him, both wolves, both armed, both staring at the screen like it had bitten them.

He looked straight out of every monitor in the room and found me in one motion, the way a man finds the only door in a burning house.

"Aurora."

My name in his mouth went through me like the pull had. The straps creaked.

"Live," the doctor said. He'd gone white. "It's live. Bidirectional. Ma'am, this is—"

"Get out." The director's voice cut the room in half. The doctor scrambled for his clipboard and the door, and the glass booth light went dark behind him, and then it was just me, the chair, the wires, and the director, and Adrian on eight screens.

She stepped to the glass and spoke toward the microphone in the ceiling. Conversational. Almost fond.

"Mr. Blackwood. You've been busy."

"Where is she." Not a question. Flat and surgical, the broadcast voice, and underneath it something enormous pressing against the walls of it.

"Right here. Wired to my machines, mapping beautifully." The director tilted her head. "Do you know what your key just did? She opened the door from the inside. Nineteen years I've been waiting for someone to do that." A pause. "Attempt two, doctor. Invert the wolf."

The doctor's voice came tinny from behind the glass. "The channel—"

"Now."

The wire struck again, in me this time, a long screeching note that dragged down my spine and hooked somewhere under my ribs. The screens shivered. Static crawled up the sides of them. Adrian's jaw locked, and the tendons in his neck stood out, and blood came off his knuckles where he'd put his hand flat on the desk to hold himself up.

And the trace, the green hillside, kept climbing.

"Amplitude up twenty-six percent," the doctor said, faint. "It won't cut. It's reinforcing. Every attempt is reinforcing."

Silence in the exam room. Somewhere behind the walls the building kept running in that key I couldn't name.

Adrian straightened. His eyes never left the screen that held me. And he spoke to me, low, in front of the director, in front of whoever was behind the glass, and he didn't care.

"You're wet."

The room went very still.

"I can smell it through the wire." His head tilted a fraction. "All of that, and they still couldn't make it mine."

Heat climbed my throat and my chest and settled in my face, and the green line spiked again, and I couldn't tell which one of us the machines were recording anymore.

The director laughed. A small, delighted sound, and it was worse than anything the doctor had done.

"Then we don't cut it," she said. She leaned into the microphone. "Mr. Blackwood. Thank you. Nineteen years of doors with no keyholes, and you've handed me a rope with a man on one end of it."

"Let her walk out," Adrian said. "Tonight. You'll have my company, my pack, my name. You'll have anything you can put on paper."

"No." She said it gently. "Dusk. Come to the gate. Alone, unarmed, and we'll discuss what your key is worth." She smoothed her sleeve. "Don't come, and we finish the cut with her awake. I'll send you the audio. You'll want headphones."

"Pull," Adrian said.

Not to her. To me.

The thread snapped tight in my chest, a rope yanked hard from the far end, and I grabbed it with both hands and pulled back, and every screen in the room jumped with the strain of it.

Then they went dark. All eight, at once, like a hand had come down over a candle.

The director stood in the afterimage with her hands folded.

"Log the frequency," she said to the glass. "And tell Cross his wolf is coming."

I sat in the chair with the wires still stuck to me and the mark hot and alive under its electrode, and I understood what I'd just done. I pulled the thread because it was the only thing in that room that belonged to me. And the thread was a rope. And the director had just closed her hand around the middle of it.