Chapter 3 Feral Pact: Raze

The forest is my kingdom, and I rule it the way I rule everything else, with chaos, violence and the kind of raw power that doesn’t need permission to thrive.

And between not registering with the Directorate. Nor taking a pack name or accepting a hierarchy. I’m feral in the truest form. Uncontrolled, unregistered, dangerous. The regime all trying to hunt me down a dozen or so times during the early years, by sending operatives into my territory with weapons and protocols and the certainty they could control anything with enough force.

A dozen of times; and I slipped through their fingers.

Eventually, they just stopped trying. Some wolves not worth the effort. Some wolves costing way more to catch than they’re worth actually alive. A task I made sure they knew of to. Leaving enough bodies within my wake that the Directorate decided I was a better problem left unsolved. Better to let the feral wolf keep his forest than waste resources on something that couldn’t be broken.

Plus, I preferred it that way. Alone meant freedom. Alone meant no one could touch me, control me, or make me into something palatable for their own personal gain.

Thus, I was hunting when I first caught the scent.

The scent coming to me along the wind of the eastern territory. Faint at first, barely a whisper that carried along the pine and oak. Blood and fear and a mix of something else. Something that smelled like human but with an undertone of wolf. An operative, maybe a hunter.

Either way, it was interesting.

I soon track it throughout the forest, moving silently along the path, my instincts guiding. My senses sharper than any registered wolf. Years of living wild had honed them into a knife’s edge, that my senses were practically smelling the individual components: the scent of copper and blood. The acrid tang of fear-sweat, and the unique musk of a shifter caught in distress.

The scent growing stronger the closer I get towards the territory, more desperate. Thus, whoever it was, was certainly wounded. Dying, even. The kind of dying that came from running to hard and bleeding much harder, from pushing one’s body past its limits because the alternative was capture.

A logic I completely knew and understood.

My eyes soon finding them within a ravine. A man, half-shifted, and bleeding from a dozen or so wounds. His body caught between forms, caught between the agonizing space where the shift physically stalled, leaving him neither human nor wolf. His eyes golden, eyes of a shifter, his breathing shallow, rattling along his chest like something was broken.

The Directorate’s handiwork. As they had ways of breaking all shifters, ways of making sure they couldn’t complete the transformation. Ways of trapping them in liminal space, between forms, until the pain drove them mad.

I could’ve killed him. One bite to the throat, and it all be over. Could’ve left him to die along the ravine, allow the forest to take what was left. Could’ve walked away and never looked back, returned to my hunting, and pretend I’d never caught the scent.

Instead, I crouch down and study the man’s face.

Something familiar about him stirring. Something that made my protective instincts flare up. Instincts I shouldn’t have, instincts I’d burned years ago. Raze doesn’t protect. Raze doesn’t care. Raze is a full blown predator, and predators don’t bond.

Yet, my wolf was reacting to something within the man’s scent. Something in the way his body was laid, something in the defiance that was still burning deep within his eyes despite the pain, despite the blood, despite the fact that he was dying within a ravine and no one to help him.

“Who are you?” I ask.

The man’s eyes flickering to open. Struggling to focus. “Lucian,” he gasps, each word clearly costing him more. “Lucian Thorne.”

The name itself meant nothing to me. I didn’t know operatives by name. I didn’t know people. Names were anchors, and I’d spent years cutting those anchors away.

But the scent. His scent was beginning to mean something. It smelled highly like strength. Like defiance. Like someone who’d chosen freedom over safety. Someone who saw the regime’s chains and decided they’d rather die than wear them.

A decision I fully understood.

“You’re running from the regime,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I could smell the Directorate’s mark all over him. The electrical burns from the restraints, the chemical scent of their drugs, to the distinctive copper of bullets.

“Yes.”

“They’ll hunt you. They don’t let assets escape easily.”

“I know.”

I considered this. The smart thing would be to kill the man and disappear. The regime would probably reward me. The regime wanting leverage, wanting something they could use to pull me back along their orbit. And a dead operative would be proof of my continued… utility. Or at least, it would be if I cared about rewards, in which I don’t.

But something about this man, something about the way he chosen freedom over obedience, the way he refused to break even when the regime had every tool at their disposal—made me want to keep him alive.

A stupid impulse. And a dangerous one to. Yet, I ignored it like always.

“Can you walk?”

Lucian soon trying to shift back into human form. The pain visible along his face, the kind of pain that came from forcing a body to do something it couldn’t, in pushing its limit past the breaking point. Three tries. Three attempts, and eventually he manages. Lucian soon naked and bleeding and barely conscious.

“I can try,” he says, and the defiance is back. That refusal to quit even when quitting would be the more merciful choice.

Quick to help, I start by supporting his weight. The man heavy, like instant dead weight, yet clearly not true. Having spent years hunting, years running and years building muscle and power along the forest’s crucible. So when it came to holding a wounded soldier, it was nothing compared to the weight I usually carried.

The two of us moving. My feet moving us deeper and deeper. Away from prying eyes of the Directorate. The forest all knowing. The trees soon parting. While the undergrowth untangled around our feet. My entire life spent here that I’ve slowly become one with the forest, and it apart of me.

“Why are you helping?” Lucian asks after we’d been walking for what felt like hours. His voice weak and confused. Probably thinking he was hallucinating, and the pain and blood loss was making him see things that weren’t actually there.

“I don’t know,” I offer, and knew it was true. I didn’t know. I didn’t have reasons for things. I had instincts, and my instincts were telling me to keep this man alive, and it was clearly enough.

“Don’t ask stupid questions.”

The two of us still walking throughout the night, and its then, I find myself thinking about things I’d never thought about once. About packs. Belonging. About the possibility that maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to be alone anymore.

A dangerous thought. A stupid one. And the kind of thought that got wolves instantly killed. The kind that made wolves vulnerable. And the kind that turned predators into prey.

Yet, as I continued to feel Lucian’s weight pressed against my own and continued to breathe in the scent of the stranger who chosen freedom, I start to feel something deep along my chest that might’ve been hope. Or possibly the first crack in the vast walls I’d built around me, as I couldn’t quite bring myself to dismiss them easily.

The forest still my kingdom. My home. And I’ll still rule it with chaos and violence and shear raw power.

But maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to rule it alone.

The thought a terrifying one. Yet a thought that also felt like the first true thing I’d felt in a very long time.