NaNoWriMo Story Snippets

25. Excerpt from VIOLENT DELIGHTS

Author's note: See, I haven't abandoned it! Unedited, subject to change, etc.

Seth. Rollins. He answered to both of them, but neither was his real name. Hunter had let him have a hand in choosing them to a degree, which was more than a lot of the Authority wolves could say, and he was so used to them now that when people—even his mother or brother—called him by his real name, it took a moment for it to sink in.

That was the way the Authority wanted it, of course. They wanted their wolves to disconnect from their families, their former lives. The fewer connections a werewolf had, the easier they were to manipulate. Seth certainly hadn't abandoned his family—Roman most certainly hadn't, and Seth pitied whoever tried to make that happen—but Hunter had a way of making the Authority invade every aspect of his wolves' lives. "Do you think Dean changed his name when he left?" he asked suddenly, glancing over at Roman.

They were sitting outside Hunter's office, waiting for their next assignment, but they dealt with the delay in very different ways. Seth's legs were pumping as if he were a drummer in the midst of his prized solo, while Roman was calmly swiping through photos of his children on his phone. "I wouldn't doubt it," Roman said absently, scrolling back to his main gallery with a sigh. "Why keep a label someone else gave you? I don't know how much he ever cared for it. He just wanted to wrestle and be in a pack; the name was just a formality to him."

Seth pressed his hands to his knees, trying to make himself still. Going into Hunter's office worried or fearful was never a good thing, but his anxiety kept roiling in his chest. "I guess. But... I mean, it meant something, right? The Shield meant something...."

The Shield. Another name he had only the slightest say in, but it had grown to mean so much to him. Seth had made plenty of mistakes in his early Authority days, but Hunter must have seen something in him, because he had summoned Seth, Roman, and Dean all to his office one day and told them they were going to be a mercenary unit, both a sword to attack the Authority's enemies and a shield to defend it from harm. The name had partially stemmed from that speech, but Seth at least had taken it to heart. He had grown up without a pack, having inherited his werewolf gene from his biological father, so his early days of shifting had mostly been alone. By the time he had found a local pack willing to take a chance on a young werewolf male—generally considered the most volatile and thus least welcome elements to any pack—he had already fallen into bad habits, ones that haunted his personal and professional life until Hunter recruited him. Roman was a stabilizing influence on him,, but the urge to slip back into those old habits was never far away, and it didn't help that Hunter often encouraged it.