Defy The Alpha(s)

Chapter 535: Project Clean Slate

Ace stood at the observation pane with a deep frown. On the other side of the one-way glass was the containment room. As its name implied, it was built to cage or to isolate, depending on the need. For Alaric, it was both.

The walls were blinding white, and sterile to the point of cruelty.. The bed was bolted to the ground, and it had a desk that looked more like it belonged in an asylum than in a packhouse. The wide glass turned the space into a specimen box, built so others could watch but never be seen.

It reminded Ace of those setups you saw in movies where the government stole people away and conducted secret experiments on them. But this place was built for controlled experiments, not family.

Right now, his brother, Alaric, looked vulnerable lying on that bed. His wrists hung heavy at his sides, chest rising in shallow breaths. Even unconscious, Alaric’s face was drawn tight, with his jaw clenched as though his rage had followed him into sleep. The sight twisted something in Ace’s stomach.

Ace pressed his palm against the glass and snatched it back when his own reflection stared back at him, wide-eyed and shaken. He still could not forget what happened.

All his life he had envied Alaric, their parents’ golden son, the one who carried all their pride. But watching Zara cough and clutch her throat on the floor while guards dragged Alaric away had knocked the envy clean out of him. All that was left was shock and a cold knot of dread.

Ace knew his mother can be cold and go to the extreme at times but locking Alaric in the containment room like a dangerous animal was a little too much. He was his brother after all.

Then again, strangling your mother was also too far. That part wasn’t negotiable.

reason for that kind of rage. If he could understand what made his brother attack his mother, perhaps, he could come up with a solution to settle the

once, he wasn’t going to be selfish. They were family after all. So Ace turned from

was the most technically advanced and industrialized pack. The main packhouse sat at the crest of a slope, stone and glass stacked in clean lines and screamed of wealth. That was

that never iced even in winter. This was the Storm Complex. The left wing specialized in biomedicine and neural science. The

materials and volatile compounds in temperature-controlled bays. W-B held crates of finished prototypes, sealed drums, and racks of parts waiting for shipment. A narrow, rails-on-concrete corridor

central building was the sublevel where Alaric

floors aboveground where they made their own discoveries. It was a strange privilege—being raised in a house where

bridge to Zara’s floor. The guard outside the door

and the antiseptic bite that lived in the vents no matter the season. Underneath it, his mother’s scent still lingered, meaning she’d been here only minutes ago. Ace contemplated coming back later when a clutter of

forward before he could stop it and he picked the old, brown, edges furred from too much

the temples, ridged along the crown, with petals of some metallic mesh resting over where a werewolf’s umbra lobe would swell when the shift pressed

more detailed drawings and cross-sections. A map of the lupine cortex, what old papers called the "beast brain," and what the

responses burned brightest. A paragraph was underlined three times: bond recall pathways are reinforced by scent anchoring, tactile imprinting, and hormonal surge—episodic memories ’baked in’ under the bond response