Pain is a symphony. Each movement blends and crescendos until you are swept away to another time, another place, another being. You cannot control it. You cannot bend it. You can only let it take you. That is the secret. You must let it happen to you. Give over to it. It will win every time.

Today, my tormentor was the maestro. Each punishing blow to my core took away pieces of me. Had he just stayed with that, I might have been able to stay on my feet. He didn’t though. Maestro studied every ragged breath I took. I couldn’t see him. Part of his genius was to keep me blindfolded. I had never once seen his face. But, I could scent him a mile away. He smelled of musk and pine. I could sense his movements from the change in the air. I tried to brace for the next kick. I shouldn’t have done that. I forgot the first lesson. I tried to control it. The next kick hit me in the back where I didn’t expect it.

Mercifully, blackness came for me. He’d gone too far.

Later, sunlight hit my cheek. I lay in something wet and sticky. The urge to cough gripped me and I spread my palms on the ground, trying to stop it. My ribs were broken again. They would heal in a few hours if they left me alone. I tried to open my eyes, but once again they were swollen shut.

“Gunnar!” A hushed whisper reached my ears. It hurt to try and listen. God, had they ruptured my eardrum this time?

I got one eye open and saw the hand crawling toward me. It seemed odd, almost disembodied, the bent fingers skittering toward me like a spider. He touched my wrist and feeling returned to my body in wave after wave of agony. I exhaled, trying not to bend to it.

“You in there?” the voice reached me again.

I couldn’t hold the coughing fit back. It wracked through my broken body, waking me fully.

“Yeah,” I managed to choke out. I spat blood from my mouth and tried to sit upright. Big mistake. The room spun. I slid backward, propping my back against the wall. Calling it a room was a stretch. This was little more than a cage. Four cement walls boxing an eight-foot by eight-foot patch of straw-covered ground. The roof was thatched grass and straw, not sturdy enough to keep the rain out.

One huff and puff from this big bad wolf and I could have blown the place to smithereens. Except for one thing.

Dragonsteel.

They’d chained my wrists and ankles with it, anchoring me to a post somewhere outside the cell. Even at full strength, I couldn’t break through it. Dragonsteel is the only metal strong enough to hold back a shifter like me.

“Gunnar!” The voice reached me again. Each syllable of my name scraped against my consciousness, like the worst hangover you can possibly imagine.

“I’m awake,” I whispered back. “Relax, Finn. They haven’t killed me...yet.”

Finn’s soft laughter grated too. He gave me a thumbs up through the gap in the wall between our cells. He withdrew his hand and I heard shuffling straw as Finn crawled to the other side of his cell. The air seemed to shift as Finn set off a series of signals starting with the cell on the other side of his. More shuffling, a cough here and there as the rest of the inmates got word I’d survived another day.

Every day was like this. Sometimes my captors came for me in the middle of the night, sometimes first thing in the morning. Sometimes they kept me for days. Each time, the rest of the inmates at Camp Hell would wait for me to return, each time certain that I wouldn’t.

“No one’s survived as long as you have, Gunnar,” Finn told me after my first week here. It was a dubious honor, but I supposed I had to take good news where I could.

“Glad to have you back,” Finn said. Just the tips of his fingers appeared through the gap in the wall. I pushed through the agony and reached over to put my palm over them. Finn’s flesh burned hot. He was a wolf shifter like me, so that alone wasn’t cause for alarm. But, in Finn’s case it felt like a true fever.

Finn had been in Camp Hell longer than any of us. At least, that’s what he told me. He was here when I got here. Others I’d heard were carried out in the middle of the night. New prisoners came in to fill their spots. Finn had been the lone holdout next to me.

I used to scratch the passing days in the dirt where it stayed the driest. I made it all the way to one hundred. Then, I stopped. It might be two hundred days now. It felt like more.

“Was it Maestro?” Finn asked.

“Yes.” I drew my knees up, wincing past the pain in my ribs. The skin stretched taut around them and started to itch. Molly would tell me that was a good sign. I was healing.

Molly. If I closed my eyes, I could see her. Her features were no longer vivid in my mind’s eye though. I could see her wide, brown eyes, her dark hair with thick bangs cut straight across. She had an infectious, deep laugh. Molly was Liam’s wife. Studying to become a veterinarian, she took care of the wounded in Mammoth Forest. That kept her ever busier.

Pressing the back of my head against the cement wall, I tried to imagine the caves beneath Mammoth Forest where we hid from the Pack. It was dangerous to do so. It’s what Maestro and the Chief Pack wanted from me. It was the only reason I was still alive.

Months ago...hell...for all I knew it could have been years...I had been captured by the Pack trying to rescue the women they meant to enslave. Would I do it again? I knew I would. They were innocent, human. If I’d done nothing, those women would have been marked against their will at the Chief Alpha’s whim.

They were free now. At least, I hoped to God they were. I saw Mac and Payne spiriting them away just before the Pack closed in. As I squeezed my eyes shut, that scene played out in my mind a thousand times. Mac shouting. Payne taking a hit. Dozens of girls busting through the wrought iron gates surrounding Birch Haven College. The brochure called it paradise; in reality it was another form of prison.

Had I imagined it? Had the whole thing just been a trick of my mind to make me think all this was worth it? I suffered, but the people I cared most about got away. I’d done my duty.

“Don’t fall asleep on me, man,” Finn said. He smacked his palm against the ground. Finn’s knuckles were gnarled. Three of his fingernails had been torn away, leaving puckered flesh behind. He wasn’t an Alpha wolf like I was. It took him longer to heal and when he did, his scars were probably worse.

“I’m awake,” I said, coughing up blood.

“Good. What do you want me to tell Rackham and Jones?”

Rackham had the cell on the other side of Finn. Jones was on Rackham’s other side. Sometimes, I could hear Rackham moaning in his sleep. I’d never heard Jones at all. He could be a figment of Rackham’s imagination for all I knew. Finn said Rackham was a beta wolf like him. I got the impression they’d known each other on the outside, though Finn would never say anything like that for sure. None of us would. The Pack could be listening. It was also entirely possible that Finn himself was a member of the Pack put here to ferret information from me.

I kept my guard up. So did Finn. And yet, Finn knew who I was. Somehow, he’d managed to see me dragged in. I didn’t have to say a word. The ink on my chest would have told him everything he needed to know.

The tattoo had been Jagger Wilkes’s idea. Years ago, he’d been the first of us to break free from the Pack’s influence. His cousin Liam had gone with him. They brought Mac along. Then, they found me. The moment we left the Pack, we were hunted traitors. Rebels. Resistance fighters, though that was never what we set out to be. At first, we just wanted to get away.

But, with freedom comes great responsibility. We couldn’t stand by and watch the horrors of the Pack unfold. We found hidden caves in Mammoth Forest. We set up camp. Then slowly, year after year, we helped others get out too. To prove our loyalty to each other and our cause, Liam, Mac, Jagger and I marked ourselves. The sprawling tattoo now took up the upper part of my chest. A black wolf’s head with great, unfurled wings, and beneath that, two crossed daggers. The Pack knows anyone bearing this mark is a traitor. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, it made them want to hurt me worse.

“Tell them whatever you want,” I said. It got hard to hold my head up. Finn might raise holy hell, but I damn well wanted to sleep. One of the guards could come back at any moment. Or, they might not come back for days.

“Hang in there, man,” Finn said. He always said it. In the past, it had given me comfort. Now, I just wanted to be left alone.

“I’m all right,” I said, sliding my hand beneath the gap in the wall. “I’m just going to rest a little while. Is it dawn or evening?”

Finn’s soft laughter gave me a small amount of comfort. “Evening,” he said. “You missed dinner. Gray slop.”

I switched positions, putting my weight on my left hip. Slowly, I lowered myself to the ground and kicked the chains out from underneath me. I would give anything to shift into my wolf. In the beginning, the urge to let him out nearly drove me mad. As the weeks wore on, I felt him go quiet. The chains kept my inner wolf at bay as well. Fucking dragonsteel. How the hell the Pack managed to get their hands on so much of it was another great mystery.

“I’m going to go to sleep now, Finn,” I said. “That’s the way it’s gonna be. Don’t worry. You’ll hear me breathing. I hope.”

Finn let out a little growl. I couldn’t bear to think how long he’d had to contain his own wolf. He was still alive though. His mind still mostly sound. Was it easier for betas? I had to think it was. Morbid as it was, Finn was the canary in the coal mine for me. As long as he was here, I wasn’t done yet either.

I laid my cheek against my hand. My chest pulled tight as I put weight on my side. But slowly, carefully, I let myself go. The cell spun and my stomach rolled, but I kept my breathing steady.

Finn started to hum. He’d do it whenever I stopped talking to him. I used to hate it; now it gave me a strange comfort.

A full moon rose. Its bright halo seemed to waver as I watched it through the tiny slits in the thatched roof. It seemed so close, as if I could reach out and touch it.

Finn went silent except for his slow, ragged breaths. His fingers beneath the wall went slack and finally withdrew as he must have rolled to his other side. There was nothing more to listen to beyond my own heartbeat.

I don’t know how long I lay there. Long enough that my ribs reknit. An hour? Maybe two. Clouds rolled in to block the moon. I couldn’t hear Finn breathing anymore. My heart thundered inside of me. No. Not tonight.

The shock of silence made me sit straight up. I bit past the searing pain in my side. I would have called to him. I would have rattled the chains as loud as I could. But there was something out there. Something that made every other creature in the woods dart for cover.

I crouched as low as I could, trying to see through the gap in the wall to the woods beyond.

A pair of dark eyes appeared through the bushes. My heart went still. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Heat snaked its way through my chest and my vision wavered. Hot breath caressed my cheek. The eyes blinked once. Twice.

She.

The truth of it slammed into my chest with as much force as any of Maestro’s blows. There was a woman out there. Her scent poured over me, warm, sweet and strong. I dug my fingers into the ground. My inner wolf stirred with more force than I’d felt in weeks. With no conscious thought, a growl ripped from me.

I felt her heart trip. I’d scared her. Acting on instinct, I launched myself toward the gap in the wall. I had to get out. I had to see her. Branches cracked and the bushes shimmied. Then, the pair of brown eyes disappeared. She was gone.

“The fuck are you doing, Gunnar?” Finn shouted. Beside him, Rackham stirred. I could hear his own chains rattle. My wolf had disturbed all of them. They heard my growl.

Stupid. So stupid. The Pack would sense it too.

“Nothing,” I said, settling back against the wall. “I just thought I saw something.”

“What?”

I didn’t mean to give voice to it. But, I did. “A girl,” I answered.

Silence, then Finn’s deep laugh split the air. “Shit, Gunnar. You had me scared there for a second. I thought you were dying. Relax, Rackham. Gunnar just had himself a wet dream.”

“Fuck you,” I muttered, drawing my knees to my chest. That got easier too. But, as I did it, I felt a dull, heated throbbing between my legs. Finn was half right. The woman’s scent stirred something else inside of me besides my wolf. God, how long had I been in this hellhole? How much longer could I survive?

“Break time’s over!” A voice cut through the stillness. Finn’s chains rattled as he moved to the far corner of his cell.

The clouds lifted and the full moon shone bright. Leaves crunched under heavy, booted footsteps.

Maestro was back.