None of it fits me.
A Prime Alpha does not have panic attacks.
A Virelli does not spiral.
And yet here I am, reloading a weapon in a concrete hole beneath a building I don’t own, trying to breathe past a heart rate that my designation interprets not as anxiety but as proximity to something worse.
The feral state.
I frown at the thought—the expression involuntary, the facial muscles contracting around an idea that I keep at arm’s length the way you keep a loaded weapon pointed at something you’re not prepared to shoot. The feral state. The final deterioration of Alpha neurology that occurs when the designation’s requirements—pack stability, bonded connection, the particular neurochemical equilibrium that an Omega’s presence maintains—go unmet for too long. The progressive erosion of rational function. The simplification of the cognitive architecture from complex to binary, from nuanced to primitive, from the mind of a man who plans and calculates and considers consequences to the mind of something that only wants two things.
Fuck.
And kill.
That’s what the feral state reduces you to.
A creature operating on the two most basic Alpha imperatives, stripped of everything that makes those imperatives manageable.
I’m inching toward the mark.
I can feel it—the way the edges of my rational thought are starting to fray, the way the anger is becoming less aboutDamien and more about everything, the way the aggression is becoming less targeted and more ambient.
I’ll probably die before reaching that extent.
Put a bullet to my own head.
The thought arrives with the particular, seductive clarity of an idea that has been considering itself in the background for longer than I’d like to acknowledge. Clean. Simple. A single decision that resolves every equation simultaneously—the bounty, the betrayal, the masquerade, the Omega with the empty eyes, the pack that depends on a Prime whose Prime function is deteriorating in real time.
Inviting.
But—
I’d rather die trying to fight this end than do it by my own hands.
Unless it’s my last resort.
And I’m not there yet.
Not yet.
I raise the weapon. Steady my aim. Engage the target tracking that my training installed and that my current mental state is doing its best to corrupt. The target slides right. I adjust. Lead the movement. Calculate the trajectory with the fragment of cognitive function that isn’t consumed by the spiral.
We’re going to have to talk to this girl and her pet Alpha.
The thought intrudes on my aiming with the particular timing of a mind that refuses to compartmentalize when compartmentalization is the only thing that might produce a clean shot. The feral Alpha.Hawk.The man who stood beside her in Violet’s office and announced his love for her with the casual specificity of someone reading weather conditions—factual, inevitable, not up for discussion.
The idea of him being feral intrigues me.
Especially with how surprisingly tame he was at her side.
A feral-prone Alpha operating at the level of social functionality he demonstrated in that meeting suggests one of two things: either his feral state is less advanced than his designation implies, or the woman beside him is exerting a stabilizing influence so profound that it overrides the neurological deterioration that feral-prone Alphas experience in the absence of a bonded Omega.
Given that they’re unbonded?—
The second option is the more interesting one.
And the more concerning.
