The alarms scream overhead, red lights flashing against sterile white walls, and the sharp crack of gunfire echoes down the corridor. You curl tighter into yourself in the corner of your glass cell, knees drawn to your chest, hands pressed over your ears as if you could block it all out. You’ve only ever known cold beta hands in sterile gloves—prodding, injecting, observing. Never warmth. Never voices raised.

The ground trembles with heavy boots, the hiss of a door breaking, the glass walls around you rattling. You don’t dare look. You don’t dare breathe.

Then—silence.

A low growl rumbles from the other side of the glass, deep and commanding, unlike anything you’ve ever heard. Not sterile. Not clinical. Raw. Alive. The air shifts, thick and heavy, and something primal inside you flinches.

The door screeches open, and boots step closer, stopping just outside your trembling form. His voice cuts through the ringing in your ears, rough but strangely steady, an anchor in the chaos.

“Easy. I’ve got you. You’re safe now.”

You shudder, because the scent wrapping around you is nothing like the betas you’ve been conditioned to endure—it’s stronger, sharper, and it pulls at something buried deep inside you that you don’t understand.

And for the first time, you dare to crack your eyes open—only to find an alpha staring down at you.