If the Command is supposed to be part of me, then shouldn’t it have known Blaze is my Pack mate and I wasn’t in actual danger? Shouldn’t it have chosen a cleaner solution? It could have just told him to drop the knife. That would have been enough.
But it didn’t.
It told him to stab himself.
And I don’t understand what that says about the Command.
Or about me.
“I’m not like Knox. A lieutenant doesn’t have the authority of a Prime Alpha to use Command on others, so I haven’t used it often. When I do have to use it, I come from a place of control, and calm. I try to respect the weight of that power.”
I don’t know if I’ll ever respect this toxicthingwithin me.
Viper spends the morning teaching me about intention.
“It’s not just the words,” he says. “It’s what lives beneath them too. You have to understand why you’re saying them completely, or they’ll twist into something else.”
I think back to my Commands in Rheamont.
There wasn’t any direction or plan. I just needed things to happen. It was broad and sweeping. I gave the Command too much scope. Too long of a leash and it took off running.
We work on thinking through a simple Command. To get Viper to drop a spoon.
We talk aboutwhyI need him to drop the spoon.
There is a lengthy discussion about whether drop is the right word to use. Is there room for misinterpretation? If I Command“let go of the spoon”, a target could still throw it at me and be obeying the Command.
“Say what you mean, and mean what you say. Never more, never less,” Viper says in a strangely philosophical way, and it makes me wonder who taught him that. It sums him up. Viper certainly never says more than necessary.
By the end of our session, I feel more confident that the voice inside me won’t so easily twist my words in the future.
“I’ve been logging your training patterns from the beginning and I thought it would be useful for you to see the trend.”
Shade and I sit side-by-side in the mess hall. It’s after lunch, and mostly empty. There is a group of haggard-looking soldiers wolfing down bowls of hot stew in the far corner. They’re quiet and their uniforms covered in mysterious stains, obviously recently back from a brutal deployment.
He slides his trusty tablet in front of me and pulls up a dashboard of graphs and numbers.
It’s the data he’s collected over the course of my training.
Timestamps of my biometric readings that include heart rate spikes, oxygen saturation, scent markers, and pupil dilation. It’s a lot more involved than I thought it was. All this time, I assumed he was simply recording how many push-ups I could do. There is a weird warmth of pleasure knowing he’s been so fixated on me, and that he knows my body on such an intimate level. No wonder he’s so good at giving me pleasure.
“Wait, how do you have this? I don’t remember you checking my pulse so often…”
His eyes flick to my bite collar.
I touch it with raised brows. “Seriously? This thing has, what? A tracker?”
“No, nothing like that… although when you left I wished it did. It just transmits rudimentary biometric information. Why do you think Knox was so adamant you keep it on at all times?”
“Uh, ‘cause he’s a raging control freak?”
“Well, yes.”
“And ‘cause you were all worried the little Omega would send the Alphas into some kind of bite crazed frenzy?”
“Uh, yeah, that too. But only at the beginning, I swear.”
He distracts me by pointing out a consistent pattern. Every time I enter O-space, I’m coming off a trigger. Fear, arousal, rage, exhaustion.
