Taming the Wild Beast of Alamina

The room beyond was cold enough to slow pheromone decay and quiet enough to make every machine sound deliberate.

Andrea Vale lay behind transparent containment glass, strapped to a medical frame tilted just enough to keep his lungs working without comfort. Suppression seals circled his throat, wrists, chest, and the base of his skull. His skin had gone gray beneath the clinical light. Faint black-silver traces remained under his veins where Nero had torn power out of him by the roots.

He looked smaller.

Thomas felt nothing clean about his satisfaction.

Andrea’s eyes opened slowly.

For a moment, he did not focus.

Then he saw Thomas.

Fear arrived before hatred.

Thomas smiled.

"Lancaster," Andrea rasped.

"Vale."

Andrea swallowed, throat working against the suppression collar. "Come to kill me?"

"No."

Hope flickered in those lightless blue eyes.

Thomas let him have it for one breath.

"Not yet."

The hope died exactly as expected.

Thomas stepped closer to the glass. "You are going to tell me who trained you."

Andrea’s cracked mouth twitched. "And if I refuse?"

Thomas looked at the monitors keeping him alive.

Then back at him.

"Then we make refusal last longer than you can."

"Shouldn’t you at least lie nicely to me? Try to say you can give me what is mine back?" Andrea asked, tilting his head as much as the restraints allowed. His fiery red hair had dulled to something almost brown under the clinical lights. "Offer something?"

"No." Thomas stepped in front of the glass. "I love that Sylvia has your power now."

Andrea’s mouth twitched.

"She is more trustworthy than you," Thomas continued, almost idly. "And smarter."

The words were slow. Careless. Cruel in the exact way Thomas intended.

Andrea’s eyes glared, wounded by vanity.

A shallow wound, still bleeding even after Nero had torn everything meaningful out of him.

Thomas looked through the glass at the strapped body of the man who had almost drowned Roslew in infection and smiled faintly.

"You were lucky, Andrea."

Andrea’s expression froze.

"The beasts answered because you were lucky. Because someone gave you a tool and you mistook using it for understanding it."

Andrea’s nostrils flared.

"You were never the architect," Thomas said. "You were never the mind behind anything. You were a petty, bitter little man with stolen command and enough arrogance to think a leash made him a god."

Andrea’s breathing changed. The monitors noted it immediately.

Thomas heard the physician move behind him, but no one interrupted.

"You do not know anything important," Thomas said. "You were given enough to be useful and too little to be truly dangerous. That is why you knew two resistance points. Not ten. That is why you could move beasts, but not sustain them once Nero touched you. That is why Sylvia is already better at using what you lost."

Andrea’s eyes went bloodshot.

"She is not better. She is a filthy little accident."

Thomas’s smile vanished.

Andrea saw it and, being exactly as stupid as Thomas had accused him of being, mistook danger for victory.

"No inferior dominant omega like Dean Fitzgeralt or that newly made creature of yours would ever be allowed inside Claudia’s Palace," Andrea hissed. "Do you understand? None of you understand. You crawl around battlefields and courts pretending power is rank, pretending alphas are leaders because they can tear things apart."

Thomas did not move.

Andrea laughed, wet and cracking. "Dominant alphas are good for fighting and fucking. That is all. Useful seed when needed, if the line requires it. But saints? No. Saints are dominant omegas. True ones. Pure ones. Not your misclassified little pet. Not Dean with his filthy political collar and his guard-dog prince."

The room went very quiet.

Thomas felt the rage inside him become clean.

"Claudia’s Palace," he said.

Andrea’s mouth remained open.

Only then did he realize.

Thomas smiled again.

Andrea’s face changed.

"You did not know," Thomas said softly. "You thought you were defending something holy, and you gave me its name."

Andrea jerked against the restraints. The movement achieved nothing except making the monitors protest.

"No."

Thomas looked at the technician. "Did it record?"

The technician’s voice came out thin. "Yes, Commander."

"Good."

Andrea’s breathing turned harsh. "You cannot find it."

Thomas looked back at him. "You should not have told me it was a place."

Andrea’s eyes widened.

"You should not have told me it is a palace." Thomas stepped closer to the glass. "You should not have told me dominant omegas are brought there. You should not have told me alphas are only used there."

Andrea’s lips trembled.

"No," he whispered. "I never said that!"

"You were so desperate to be superior that you forgot to be silent and how much one can read in a few sentences."

Thomas opened the inner chamber.

The guards moved at once.

So did the physician.

"Commander," the physician said carefully, "he remains valuable."

"He has given us direction," Thomas said.

"Not enough."

Thomas looked at him.

The physician went pale.

Thomas entered the chamber alone.

The cold hit harder inside. Suppression burned along the walls, making even his restrained field feel scraped raw. Andrea tried to shrink back, but the frame held him where he was. His body had no dignity left. No court charm. No wife to poison. No beasts to call.

Thomas stood beside him.

Andrea stared up at him, breathing too quickly now, each shallow pull of air caught and measured by the machines.

"You will not do it," Andrea said.

Thomas reached past him and switched off the alarm attached to his restraints.

The sharp warning tone vanished.

The heart monitor continued its nervous rhythm.

The physician struck the intercom control. "Commander Lancaster."

Thomas disconnected that too, and silence settled inside the chamber.

Andrea’s eyes followed his hand. "They will stop you."

"No."

"You are a soldier."

"And?"

"You obey orders."

"When they are given by someone with the authority to give them."

Andrea swallowed.

Thomas removed his jacket.

He folded it once and placed it across the empty medical tray beside the frame.

Every movement was deliberate.

That frightened Andrea more than shouting would have.

Thomas had been called "the Wall" for most of his military career. Younger soldiers sometimes called him "the Boulder" when they believed he could not hear them. The names had begun because of his size, his silence, and the absolute lack of visible emotion with which he received wounds, insults, and catastrophe.

They had survived because Thomas Lancaster did not retreat.

He did not bend.

He stood wherever he had been placed until everything attempting to pass him broke.

Very few people understood that walls were not harmless.

A fortress wall existed to keep something out.

A boulder rolling down a mountain existed for nothing at all except destruction.

Andrea pulled against the restraints again.

"Whatever she told you—"

Thomas hit him.

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