Thunder was very busy with his work, though not because the job was particularly taxing. He had received a commission to format and template a comic book someone had written and drawn. The comic was okay quality, he supposed, though he didn’t know for sure because he wasn’t a big fan of that genre and style of writing. All he really had to do was look up formats, and then fit all the pieces together, then send the finished digital project back to the owner.

It was no business of his that the guy couldn’t bother to do this work himself. He wasn’t in charge of the comic’s future success.

The work was easy, if a bit time-consuming, as the writing had been sent to him by way of pictures taken of notebook pages, filled with terrible handwriting. He had to transpose everything over, and he was also allowed to clean up the drawings if he saw fit.

He had done harder things.

However, he was still very busy with it, and that was because he was in a lot of pain and could only move very slowly. The pain came from his battered heart, and his ambushed body.

There had been five of them. That was not so many as to be impossible for a wolf to take down, especially not an alpha. If he had moved faster, attacked them the instant they surrounded him, he would have had the jump on them and he would have been fine.

That wasn’t who he was.

Violence was not necessarily the way of the dominant.

Not even when he knew the motherfucker in charge of this, the one who had approached him as he was walking in the direction of the park to try and gather his thoughts. It was supposed to be an ordinary day at work. He would fiddle with the client’s comic book, letting the fresh breeze carry him on long past the point where he was fed up with the monotony of typing and deleting, pasting and adjusting.

And then Damien had approached him out of nowhere, as if he had simply been lying in wait, waiting for this to happen. He stepped out of what was probably the last alleyway Thunder would go past before entering the park.

“Hey,” Damien said. “You.”

Thunder recognized the punk on sight, though he had no reason to suspect Damien would be able to do the same for him. They had only crossed paths that once, and Damien had been far more concerned about the gang members. One random person sitting in the café should not jog his memory to where he spoke with such familiarity.

“What about me?” Thunder said.

“You’re the guy Abe is dating.”

Thunder blinked, a little taken aback. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he grew warrier about the direction this was possibly heading. “So what if I am?” he had asked.

“You didn’t provide an alibi for him when the cops got him. And he chose you over us. What kind of fairness is that? Is that what you call love, huh, loverboy?”

How the hell does he know all this?

He vaguely recalled Abraham saying something about Damien having a connection in the police station, or something like that. Word had gotten around to him that Abraham had been arrested, or perhaps he had done some snooping on his own to see what was happening with his estranged gang member.

Either way, this was not a good situation from the start and it had only kept getting worse.

“We just need to talk to you,” Damien said, and then the four other gang members had spilled out of the alleyway, surrounding Thunder. He saw glimmers of metal protruding from their fingers, their sleeves, and he didn’t know if these were knives or guns being pointed at him. Both were dangerous. One was immediately deadly if he made a wrong move.

Thunder let the gang members push him back into the alley, deep enough where a person walking by wouldn’t see what was going on just out of the corner of their eye.

He should have fought. He should have punched Damien in the mouth first thing for even showing up in front of him. Punching him would have solved nothing, though it would have felt damn good to give this manipulative jerk a taste of his own medicine.

But, feeling good was not reason enough, and so he tried to talk his way out of it.

“Even if I had tried to tell the police that Abraham was with me the whole time, it wouldn’t have mattered,” he said. He kept his eyes on the armed gang members, trying to plan out his attack if push came to shove, as he suspected it would. “They had his face on the security footage.”

A flicker in Damien’s eyes had told Thunder the gang member hadn’t known that. “You could have stalled. Bought him some time. Thanks to you, the rest of us are being caught, one by one. You’re dissolving my gang, you fucker. I’m not happy about that. And neither is Abraham.”

A chill passed through Thunder, like the dank alley had breathed on him. “Abraham hasn’t been talking to you,” he said. He wanted to believe what he said. He wanted it so much to be the truth. “He left you. You said so yourself.”

“We aren’t done with him. This is a message in his name.”

And then all five men had jumped him, and he could do nothing but fight back as hard as he could. The urge to become a wolf burst out of him as soon as the first knife blazed a line of heat through his flesh. He dropped down to the ground on his paws and was in the middle of springing back up when something cold and hard had been shoved against the side of his head. It felt round.

He froze, all of his muscles stiffening like a waterfall confronted with a flash freeze. Very, very slowly, he lowered all four paws back down to the earth and held as still as he could.

Damien circled around in front of him. His eyes were so, so cold. Nothing that resembled true emotion could survive when faced with such frigidness. “If you want to live,” he said, “you’ll cut out this magic bullshit and take it like a man.”

Thunder transformed, crouching on the concrete floor of the alley. He started to speak, to ask how the hell Damien knew about shifters, when a shoe to the mouth silenced him. And the beating commenced.

They kicked and hit him, threatened him with their knives by slicing just the surface of his skin, then suddenly jabbing deeper. He crouched on the ground on his hands and knees, wanting to shift, dying even to scream and give voice to some of his hurts, but he was terrified the slightest movement would cause the person wielding the gun to fire it. He didn’t want to die.

At first.

Later, when they left him lying on the ground, beaten and bloodied with a knife sticking out of his shoulder, he thought that dying might be preferable to the truth.

Damien had said they were not done with Abraham.

Did that mean he had gone back to them as soon as he was out of Thunder’s sight again? Had he felt betrayed the whole time by Thunder’s cooperation with the police?

That couldn’t be. After all, Abraham was working with the police.

But was he only doing it for the lessened punishment?

How helpful was he actually being to them?

This is a message in his name.

In his name.

Was that only something Damien had said, or was it the truth that Abraham had wanted this beating to stand as a message for him?

Thunder had gone to the hospital. He made up a convincing story for the doctors and nurses, which he then conveyed to the police. Until he knew the whole truth, he was not going to point fingers.

He no longer felt confident in his own thoughts, which circled and circled around in his mind, tangling up what had been said and what had only been implied.

He stopped responding to the messages Abraham sent him. He didn’t know who to trust.

The depression was back, and paranoia arrived on its heels.

For perhaps the millionth time since he had received the text message in the middle of the night, Thunder looked up from his work, over at his phone.

Abraham had to tell him something.

He no longer wanted to know what that was about. His heart hurt too much, and he was too confused.