“Here, I think we could all use a cup of coffee right about now.”

I gave Dr. Urwin a grateful smile as he offered me a steaming mug. “Thank you.”

The low sobbing from the woman still tied up on the other side of the windows made me look back at him and Dr. Axell. “Shouldn’t she be untied?”

“That would be cruel.” Dr. Axell clicked a couple of buttons on the control panel, but what they were supposed to do I couldn’t tell—as far as I could see, nothing happened. “Her heat won’t break before she’s taken a knot, not at this stage. We will have to use another alpha subject to complete the test. A pity—we were hoping to have 351 pair-bonded by the end of the day.”

“The experiment can still be repeated with a different female, if proven successful with another male,” Dr. Urwin pointed out. “May I suggest subject 287?”

“My thoughts exactly,” Dr. Axell said as he leaned back in his chair. “He should be with us in a moment.”

He was right. It hadn’t been a minute before the steel door flew open and another snarling alpha was shoved into the room by long poles attached to metal rings around his neck and biceps. But instead of turning around to attack the men as soon as the poles were detached, like 351 had done, his wild gaze immediately zeroed in on the woman on the breeding bench. His nostrils flared as he scented the air, and a deep, rich growl sounding nothing like the fury he’d initially displayed emanated from his chest.

The woman on the bench keened loud and shrilly in response, bucking her hips what little she could.

The alpha was by her in a second, scenting her as he bent between her spread thighs.

I did my best to fight back the furious blush I could feel spreading over my entire face at the intimate display. A sentiment that was only strengthened when he—finding her more than ready—without delay mounted her and shoved his brutal cock up inside her dripping opening in one, smooth movement. All the way to the hilt.

The woman screamed and tried to both escape the invasion and spear herself deeper on his girth at the same time. Her hands locked in steel manacles clawed and clenched at air, but there was nothing she could do one way or the other.

I’d never seen sex like that. I knew video clips and images of alpha matings could be found on the internet, but I’d never had the nerve to search for them. And this… this was so much worse than seeing it on a screen. Even though the thick glass panel separated us from the pair, knowing that they knew we were watching them made the heat in my cheeks flame all the hotter. Every thrust made me clench my hands around the edge of my seat, wishing I was anywhere but here. The woman’s cries and screams rang loud and shrill, and I winced in sympathy at the way her brutalized sex clung to the alpha’s impossible girth. He wasn’t as huge as 351, but plenty big enough to make my pelvis clench for every wet thwack of his flesh against hers.

It lasted for nearly twenty agonizing minutes.

I’d somehow managed to almost regain my professional composure when the poor woman’s hoarse cries suddenly took on a different tone. She’d long-since given up struggling, but without warning she let out a strangled yelp and tried to lurch forward. The restraints and the alpha’s hands on her hips kept her securely locked in place, but that didn’t stop her frantic struggling nor her desperate whimpers.

“What’s happening?” I asked, my worry for the woman strapped into the breeding post returning with renewed vigor. “Is he hurting her?”

“He’s about to knot her. A female will always struggle a bit, especially with a new alpha. Once he’s popped it inside is when he’ll hopefully put a claiming mark on her.” Dr. Axell didn’t look to my side, so I couldn’t decipher his expression, but I very much hoped the unmistakable excitement in his voice was purely from a scientific standpoint.

Of course. The knot. I don’t know why I hadn’t been expecting it—it was an unavoidable fact of alpha matings—the fist-sized swelling at the bottom of an alpha’s member that inflated at the end of a mating to increase the chance of fertilization. It was an entirely different thing to learn about such matters from a textbook than it was to see it in person. Part of me wanted to look away, but morbid curiosity kept me staring at the pair as the alpha’s knot finally swelled enough to make a tie.

The final, brutal thrust into the woman’s body was marked by a bloodcurdling howl from her, and a deep groan of pleasure from him. They both stilled—the woman still panting and sobbing while her body twitched as if in cramps, the alpha moaning in release.

We all stared at him with bated breaths, waiting for the moment he’d lay claim to the woman he’d just fucked for all she was worth, but apart from occasionally rocking his pelvis a little and making her jerk and whimper, he didn’t move. In fact, for someone who was still intimately connected to said woman, he seemed remarkably uninterested in her, now he’d spilled his seed.

“Sonuvabitch,” Dr. Axell growled next to me. “How is he not claiming her? She’s fucking ripe as a peach!”

I blinked, not expecting that kind of language from a man with Dr. Axell’s academic achievements. He seemed to remember himself and cleared his throat. “Right. Well, I must apologize that we didn’t manage to show you the next step of the research. Clearly we’re still missing a key factor in making these alphas bond with the females we offer them. We will have to run some tests on her pheromone levels and perhaps look for more precise chemical markers.

“But before we get that far, I’d be interested in your observations of this experiment. Your analytical skills are without question.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. It was what I’d always wanted—to be asked to contribute to the scientific method of a significant research study, but… the fact that they’d missed something that seemed so obvious to me made me kind of hesitant. “Well… I mean, aren’t pair bonds meant to be… very special? I’ve always heard how an alpha simply knows when his intended mate is near. It seems to me you’re trying to force a bond without taking into consideration what the subjects might want. Perhaps this is one thing nature never intended for us to replicate in a lab.”

Dr. Urwin scoffed. “My dear girl, an alpha’s urge to claim a mate is a purely biological response, nothing more. As such, all we need to reach our goal is to find the right triggers.”

I blinked, taken aback by the patronizing tone. But when I looked at Dr. Axell, expecting him to put his colleague in place, all I got from him was a small head shake and a wry smile. “I do think you’ve watched one too many romantic movies, Miss Dorne. Trust me—alpha instincts have nothing to do with love. They’re about possession, desire… procreation. A feral alpha will not be able to even play pretend when it comes to claiming a female.”

I dug my nails into my palms to force myself to return his gaze. There was something… different in it. As if there was just a glimmer of someone else behind his professional mask—someone who spoke about alpha instincts so confidently because perhaps, deep down, he also felt them. The thought made my stomach lurch, and I gave in to the instincts at the back of my consciousness murmuring about the dangers of provoking an alpha. I dropped my eyes and felt my shoulders slump forward without my conscious choice, displaying subservient body language even as my mind still seethed with the rude dismissal.

Dr. Axell patted my knee with a large hand, lingering for just a second before he pulled it back—but it was long enough for every muscle in my body to freeze.

He’d reacted to my body language like an alpha would—giving me silent praise for falling in line with a touch. It was so inappropriate and so far from anything I could ever have expected from a man with Dr. Axell’s reputation. I stared mutely at my now hand-free knee, halfway expecting an apology. Hoping for it with all I was.

It never came.

Seemingly happy with my submission, Dr. Axell turned to Dr. Urwin and began discussing parameters for a new line of tests as if I wasn’t even there.

I sat for a moment longer until the stinging in my eyes became too much to bear. Silently, I left the room and walked back to my empty work station.

It was silly to cry, I knew that, but no matter how many times I told myself that, I couldn’t will the tears away. Dr. Axell had been my idol for so many years. Working for him had been a lifelong dream of mine, and yet in the end…. In the end, he was just like the rest of them. An alpha. A ruthless man who sought to bend anyone who disagreed with him to his will.

And in my eagerness to please him, I’d pushed my own ethical objections to his methods aside, trusting that he knew best. I’d been so damn stupid. How had I, of all people, let an alpha’s charm and dominance pull the wool over my eyes?

Christ, I’d… I’d watched a woman get violated right in front of me, and I’d done nothing to stop it.

---

I’d not been down in the section of the underground lab where the female subjects were kept. Most of my analysis was of the males’ data, and so there hadn’t been any reason to venture into that area.

There probably wasn’t any reason to tonight, either, I told myself as I walked along the empty corridors long after everyone else had gone home for the night. But despite the urge to turn around, go back to my work station, and—ideally—forget all about what I’d witnessed earlier today, I kept walking.

I needed to see that she was all right before I’d be able to sleep tonight for the guilt gnawing at my gut.

The female subjects were kept in a long cell block on the eastern side of the facility. They were locked in individual cells along a narrow hallway, but unlike the males, they weren’t separated from each other by thick concrete walls. They each had an area that was shielded from their fellow inmates, where a mattress and restroom facilities were located, but the rest of each small cell was only separated from their immediate neighbors by bars.

I found the female subject—A642, as the paperwork attached to the cell door revealed—curled up on her mattress, which had been dragged over to the bars between her cell and her neighbor to the left. The woman on the other side of the bars was stroking her still-messy hair and mumbling soothingly. She quieted when I stopped in front of the cell, shooting me a disgusted look.

“Is she all right?” I asked when A642 didn’t so much as move to acknowledge my presence.

“What do you care?” her neighbor spat.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. What did I care—beyond making myself feel better? If she was okay—which so far not much pointed toward—then what? Could I really just be on my merry way, content in the knowledge that what I’d witnessed would happen to all of these women?

“I brought this,” I said, holding out a pack of ice wrapped in a towel. “For the…” No delicate way of saying it. “The swelling.”

A642’s neighbor begrudgingly accepted the offering. Once in her hand, she nudged gently at the curled-up woman. “Hey. Gloria. Take this. It’s for your pussy. It’ll make it feel better.”

I fought back a blush at the inmate’s candid language. We were so far past embarrassment over frank word choices.

I sat down on the concrete floor by the separation between the two women’s cells as Gloria sluggishly pushed the ice pack between her legs before curling back up again. But this time, she was looking at me from underneath her tangled hair.

Her dark eyes were red from crying, and I couldn’t blame her for the accusation I saw burning behind the dull look of despair.

“I saw you there. You are one of them,” she said, her voice not much more than a hoarse croak. “What do you want?”

“I… came to see how you were doing,” I said.

“How do you think I’m doing?” she spat. “How would you feel after being locked up and forced into heat for five days with no release? Or after having some feral beast of a man mate you like a bitch? You people are monsters.”

“I thought you volunteered for this study,” I said. Even to my own ears, it sounded like the worst attempt at excusing what was inexcusable.

Gloria muttered something in Spanish and didn’t answer.

“We do,” her neighbor said. “We were told we can knock up to ten years off our sentence if we participate in this study. Let an alpha fuck us now and then—maybe even meet a nice one who’ll provide for us once we’re released. They never said what they’d be like. They never said what they did to them.” She visibly shuddered and pulled her legs up so she could curl in on herself. “They treat us like we’re nothing more than lab rats. You treat us like lab rats.”

I couldn’t blame her. I was pretty sure if I’d been tied up at that breeding post and at the mercy of one of the feral alphas, I’d want to curl up and hide, too.

“I didn’t know,” I said, hating myself for sounding like such a sad apologist. “Today was… it was the first time I saw what… what happens here.”

“You’re new,” Gloria said dully. “You’ll get used to it, or you’ll disappear.”

“I won’t.” I shook my head, determination welling up in my chest. “I’ll go to the press, if I have to.”

The neighbor woman snorted. “The press? You think anyone gives a shit about criminals being treated like breeding stock? This isn’t Mattenburg. No one cares.”

“I care,” I said, wrapping my fingers around the bars separating me from the two women inside. “I’ll help you. This isn’t right.”

Gloria shook her head. “Don’t. No one here will take your help. The alternative is being sent back to prison, and believe me—it’s not better than here.”

“Really?” I blinked. It wasn’t that the prison system had the best reputation, but I’d kind of assumed it would beat being hauled in to mate with feral alphas whenever the doctors saw fit.

Gloria’s neighbor shrugged. “At least there’s always enough food. And for ten years, I’ll take a lot of knots. Even if it’s in front of Dr. Pervert and his team. If anyone would take your help, it’d be the alphas.”

“They have even more to lose,” I said, dropping my gaze when 351’s haunting eyes flickered before my mind’s eye. “If I intervene, they’ll go back on death row.”

The woman shrugged before returning her attention to Gloria. “Seems to me they’re already dead. Nothing human left in them, anyway. If it were me, I’d rather the needle.”