Lean’s POV
The cold metal of the shackles burned my wrists with every step, as if the silver wasn’t content with just anchoring our wolf—it wanted to leave its mark on the skin too, to remind us every minute that we were no longer Alphas or warriors: we were wreckage, paraded before an enemy escort that moved without haste, reveling in our nakedness, in the dried blood stuck to our chests, in the still-fresh bruises that no regeneration process could quite mend.
The ground, hard and dusty, clung to our bare feet like shame; they forced us to march in human form to deepen the humiliation, and every time Kael let out a muffled growl—because they wouldn’t even let him lift his head—I felt the tug in our mate marks, that bond now vibrating not with pleasure, but with a helpless rage that thr
