Taming the Wild Beast of Alamina

Two weeks passed with the pace of a drunk snail.

Dean and Arion spent most of them buried in decisions, wounded pride, sealed reports, and the increasingly horrifying possibility that someone had been controlling the beasts for years.

There were briefings with Saha, Palatine, Rohan, and Draxil. There were censored field records, rewritten emergency logs, and enough restricted channels to make even Hendrik look tired.

Officially, Andrea Vale was dead.

Unofficially, Andrea Vale was breathing beneath the palace because everyone needed to know who had taught him to turn infection into command.

Nero recovered in about three days, if one used the word "recovered" with great generosity. It meant he no longer had open wounds, no longer bled from the nose when irritated, and only looked half-dead instead of theatrically murdered.

Chris still kept him under watch.

Dax helped by pretending not to enjoy that.

Sylvia remained under strict monitoring because no one knew what she was now, not in any useful medical sense. The physicians had little to compare her to except Imperial Consort Ethan of Palatine, who had once been Christopher of Saha’s beta friend before a chemical accident shifted him into an omega and, eventually, into Sirius of Palatine’s consort.

The situations were not the same.

Not even close.

But they were similar enough for desperate doctors to feel less useless.

Sylvia’s parents were informed.

Like everyone else, they were informed through a lie.

Sylvia had chosen it herself.

She told them she had awakened under battlefield stress, that she had been misclassified, and that the hospital was being cautious because dominant-omega development at her age was unusual but not impossible.

Her parents had come to Alamina a year ago. They knew their daughter too well not to feel that something was wrong.

Sylvia decided to be a coward for once in her life.

She hid behind Thomas, his parents, Dean, and the official paperwork that called her a dominant omega with dormant output.

No one blamed her.

Thomas recovered in two weeks.

Everyone discovered, with a mixture of medical horror and political interest, that Thomas Lancaster with a dominant omega stabilizing him, even at the minimal level Sylvia was permitted to offer, could heal broken ribs and open, gushing wounds at a speed that made Seven’s eye twitch.

Sylvia was not allowed to push.

That order had come from Seven, Dean, Marianne, Daniel, Arion, and Thomas himself, which made it the most aggressively supported medical restriction in the palace.

Still, her field reached for him sometimes.

A clumsy little pulse of something new and uncertain that brushed against Thomas’s pain before she could fully stop it.

Each time, his body answered, the monitors improved, and Thomas looked at her like she had placed her hands around his heart and decided it was worth keeping.

She hated that part of her, the selfish and exhausted part, that was glad to be able to do something for him after all the nights she had watched him come back from the field worn thin by pheromone strain and pretended not to notice how much he had to hold himself together.

The physicians wrote careful words.

Unprecedented. Promising. Volatile. Mate-responsive.

Dean read the reports and made the face of a man who wanted to set paperwork on fire but understood that paperwork was currently shielding his best friend from the world.

Thomas read none of them.

Thomas waited.

The day Seven finally signed his limited release, the hospital wing felt it before the order reached the room.

Guards straightened. Nurses found urgent reasons to be elsewhere. Marianne Lancaster arrived in person because apparently "limited release" required maternal supervision when the patient was her son and had the survival instincts of an insulted warhorse.

"You are not cleared for combat," Seven said.

Thomas buttoned the black uniform jacket over the bandages still wrapped beneath it. "This is not combat."

Seven stared at him. "That is exactly the sentence people say before making my life worse."

Marianne stood beside the door, arms folded. "He will not fight."

Thomas looked at her.

Marianne looked back.

He said nothing.

Daniel, seated beside Sylvia’s bed with a cup of tea he had not touched, murmured, "Progress."

Sylvia watched Thomas from the pillows, the soft medical collar still protecting her nape. Her new scent had begun to appear three days ago, faint and hesitant, something warm under rain and white flowers not yet opened.

Thomas had gone very still the first time he smelled it.

Then he had left the room for seven minutes because his field had answered too strongly, and he refused to let her first scent become another thing she had to manage for him.

She loved him painfully for that.

Now he looked at her.

"Stay with Daniel," he said.

Sylvia raised a brow. "Did you just assign me to your father?"

Daniel lifted one hand. "I accept the post."

Thomas ignored that. "Rest."

"You are going to see Andrea."

"Yes."

The room quieted around the name.

Sylvia’s fingers tightened against the blanket. Her gland pulsed once, not with fear exactly, but with memory.

Thomas crossed the room and lowered himself beside her bed with visible care. His hand found hers.

"I will not bring him back with me," he said softly.

"That is a terrible reassurance."

"It is honest."

She studied his face.

There was anger there. Of course there was. Cold, patient, breathing under discipline. But not berserk. Not the nearly shattered thing that had stood between her and the beasts with his ribs open.

He was commander again.

That frightened Andrea more than fury ever could.

Sylvia squeezed his hand. "Find out who taught him."

"I will."

"And come back."

His expression softened. "Always."

Marianne cleared her throat. "Before Seven changes his mind."

Seven looked offended. "My mind is medically consistent."

"No," Dean said from the doorway. "It is medically pessimistic, which is different."

He entered with Arion behind him, both of them looking like sleep had become a rumor. Arion handed Thomas a sealed access card.

"Four doors," Arion said. "My authorization, Dean’s field signature, Hendrik’s code, and Nero’s final warning."

Thomas took the card. "Nero’s warning?"

Dean’s mouth twitched. "He insisted."

Sylvia closed her eyes briefly. "Of course he did."

Thomas leaned down and pressed his lips to Sylvia’s forehead, his hand careful to avoid the collar, the nape, and every new and aching part of her.

Then he stood.

The sealed section beneath the eastern medical wing did not appear on palace maps.

It had once been an old containment archive from the first decades after Roslew’s modernization, when the palace had learned to hide advanced systems behind stone, bronze, and ancient pride. Now it held one officially dead Draxil consort, four layers of suppression, six armed guards per rotation, two physicians trained in keeping bodies alive against their better judgment, and enough monitoring equipment to make Andrea Vale’s breath a matter of state interest.

Thomas entered alone.

The first door opened to Arion’s authorization.

The second accepted Dean’s field signature, stored in the system like a quiet blade.

The third required Hendrik’s code.

The fourth flashed once before unlocking.

A message appeared across the panel.

DO NOT LET HIM SMELL YOU FIRST.

Thomas looked at it, his brows furrowed.

Then he opened the door.