I scrambled a few steps back, breathing hard as if I’d just run a mile. I felt like it, too. Shaking like a leaf, I turned to leave—to put as much distance between us as I could.

“Key.”

I looked back up at him at the sound of his now much softer voice. He was reaching through the bars for me, my pass in his upturned palm. Fuck. I couldn’t very well leave the lab without it.

Hesitantly, I took a step back toward him, keeping my eyes on him to make sure he wouldn’t snatch me again.

The difference on his sharp features was like night and day. Before, he’d been a mountain of unleashed fury. Now, he looked like he was trying to appear smaller, as if he was… trying not to scare me? There wasn’t an ounce of the previous anger on his face, just that intense stare of his as he looked at me unblinkingly.

Slowly, I edged closer until I was exactly close enough to reach out and snatch my card out of his hand.

He didn’t try to grasp me again, only looked at me as I quickly stepped out of reach once more.

“Thank… you,” I said, not entirely sure why I was thanking the man who’d just tried to pull my arm off. Or whatever it was he’d been doing. It dawned on me that he hadn’t actually harmed me nearly as much as he could have, should he have wanted to. Sure, I’d be sporting some pretty nasty bruises tomorrow, but I could have been dead on the floor for whoever fed the test subjects over the weekend to find.

The alpha didn’t say anything, but I could feel his eyes on my back as I made my way out of the lab.

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4

Subject 351 didn’t leave my thoughts the entire weekend. I couldn’t get his haunting eyes out of my mind, and, at night when I tossed and turned in my bed, I dreamt of him. They were disturbing dreams, filled with darkness and feral snarls, but despite the terror I felt as I slept, come morning I’d be aching and wet between the legs.

The shame from that particular bit was the worst part.

I’d never had this strong a reaction to an alpha before. Sure, I could appreciate them on screen as attractive on that primal level that spoke solely to the most primitive instincts in my body, but as soon as a male switched on the alpha aggression in person, all I felt was fear. I wasn’t like the women who flung themselves at any alpha who sniffed in their direction—I’d never seen the attraction of their dominance. They just scared me.

Sure, I could work with an alpha fine, as long as he was perfectly well-behaved—like Dr. Axell. But anything more than that?

I shuddered as memories I’d long ago repressed threatened to spill into my conscious mind. My step-dad had been an alpha, and he hadn’t liked taking care of another man’s child. I’d learned from an early age that it was best to give the aggressive ones a wide berth, and the well-mannered a cautious eye.

So why the hell did 351 make me toss and turn all nights with… with yearning, like a damn cat in heat?

These thoughts were still tumbling around in my head when I made it to work Monday morning, tired and disheveled from yet another bad night to finish up the report I hadn’t managed to complete on Friday.

My colleagues chatted quietly about a new female test subject they'd secured, while I stared blankly at 351's test results. My coffee sat next to me untouched despite my fatigue. Perhaps that was why I blurted out, "What do you do to them? During the tests?"

“Beg your pardon?” Dr. Axell looked at me over his shoulder, eyebrows raised in question.

“It’s just, it would be useful for me to know exactly what these figures are referring to,” I quickly added. Which was true, I sternly told myself. It was purely to help me do my job better. Not because the echo of the feral alpha’s voice growling out, “Always hurts,” had been playing on a loop all weekend.

“That’s a fair point.” Dr. Axell turned back to Dr. Urwin. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to let her oversee today’s tests?”

The other doctor smiled—I was pretty sure for the first time since I’d worked there. He looked genuinely excited. “Yes, I think it would be brilliant to have a fresh pair of eyes on today’s proceedings. We have procured a very interesting female candidate. I’m expecting great results today. You’re very welcome to shadow, Lillian.”

The test took place in the circular room placed in the center of the lab.

Inside was a donut-shaped room with glass panes facing the central room. Dr. Axell flicked the lights on behind the glass and revealed a sterile-white floor and ceiling, and what looked like a padded bench or narrow table. It was roughly hip-height, with four legs and a flat surface.

Nothing else was inside the room except a heavy steel door with a grid on the far side.

I sat down in the chair Dr. Axell indicated for me, frowning at the empty room. “What’s that piece of equipment for?”

He glanced at me, a little surprised. “You do know how alphas claim their mates, right?”

My frown deepened. “They give them a claiming mark. But why—?” My voice died when I recalled the circumstances in which such a mark was usually placed. “Oh.” Really wish I’d thought of that before I’d accepted the offer to shadow their work!

Flushed, I looked back at the room. This was for science—it was no more awkward than mixing bacteria in a test tube. “Ah, why not… give them a bed?”

Dr. Axell snorted. “We tried that. Once. It got destroyed during the first test. This is much more practical. And sturdy.”

The steel door inside the test room clanked and was pulled open, and I frowned again at the state of the woman Dr. Urwin dragged in with him.

She was naked, which wasn’t particularly shocking after being reminded of what was going to happen—but everything else about her, from her wild look to her unkempt appearance, made my breath catch.

Aside from her knotted hair and wild eyes, she was a pretty woman in her late twenties. She wailed hollowly as Dr. Urwin pulled her through the door and placed her face-down on the bench, but instead of struggling against him she arched her back and pushed her backside up and out, moaning pitifully.

“What’s the matter with her?” I asked, a little alarmed at the poor woman’s seemingly complete lack of awareness.

“She’s Presenting,” Dr. Axell said, and I frowned at the small smirk on his face. It was gone before I could fully process it. “We treat the females with heat-inducing hormones now. In the beginning we didn’t, and it was surprisingly difficult to get the male subjects to mount. They were too busy trying to break free to care much about whichever female we wanted them to bond with. This particular female has been kept in this state for five days, until she naturally ovulated. It is our hope that the extra allure of her enhanced scent will finally get us a completed mating claim.”

Females. I knew he was simply using scientific terms for his test subjects, but the way that word depersonalized them bothered me. True, we called alphas males, but that woman in there was no different from any other of her gender. No different from me.

The snick of metal as steel cuffs slid out of the mating bench and locked around the woman’s wrists pulled my attention to more pressing matters.

Dr. Urwin bent behind her, ignoring her attempts at enticing him to mount her, and spread her legs so her ankles could be secured in steel cuffs attached to the bench’s sturdy legs. Moments later he joined Dr. Axell and I to observe, offering me a polite nod as if nothing was out of the ordinary here. Which I guess it wasn’t, for them. They did this every day.

Something nagged at me, like a pesky gnat nibbling at the back of my conscience as I watched the hapless woman sob quietly into the bench she was bent over. It seemed so… so wrong. To put a human being through this much distress in the name of science.