𝐃𝐞́𝐟𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐮𝐫 || 𝐒𝐞𝐨𝐤𝐒𝐨𝐨

Chapter 17

Promising a clearly unstable alpha that he’d ground him through his changes during the most volatile days of the month wasn’t the smartest decision Joshua had ever made. But he felt better once he’d made it. Which was odd. As a lone omega now in close proximity to an apparently omega-less pack, he should really be doing his level best to extract himself from the situation. It was not a safe place to be. Yet there he was, hiking through the woods with Seokmin like they were on a date.

“Are you going to start explaining, or do I have to play twenty questions?” he asked, after almost ten minutes of silence.

“What do you want to know?”

Seokmin’s attention was focused on their surroundings, probably as much to avoid Joshua’s gaze as because there was anything to be on alert for. At most, there might have been foxes or rats in these woods. Bears or wolves, of the non-shifter variety anyway, weren’t commonplace here.

“Well, I thought the military prohibited pack formation among its teams. In fact, the way I heard it, they do everything possible to make sure packs aren’t created. How did you guys slip through the cracks?”

Seokmin kept walking at the same pace, his gaze moving left and right, sweeping the forest.

“We were an elite alpha team on a mission overseas,” he said at last. “It went wrong. Not our fault—bad intel. The base believed we’d been lost. We held it together, beat the odds, and pulled the mission off as planned. What we had to do those few weeks to keep safe, to get home… it bonded us.”

Joshua could picture it—a team of soldiers, trapped in enemy territory, fighting their way back to safety.

“Why not come clean once you got back? The army would understand.”

“Back then, we believed they would break the team up in an attempt to fracture the pack before we were fully established, since it was still early days. Or that they’d have reassigned us. We didn’t want either thing to happen. We still had work to do, and we realized how much better things were as a pack. Suho—”

“Who’s Suho?”

“Our leader. He was the one who convinced us to keep it under wraps, who said we were a better team than we’d ever been before. And he was right.”

“If that’s true, why wouldn’t the army want your teams to form packs in the first place?”

Seokmin stopped walking and turned to face him.

“Loyalty. A pack’s ties are so close that the first loyalty of a pack member is to the pack. The military needs our first loyalty to be to them. Otherwise, we might put the pack above the greater good.”

“Did that ever happen?”

Seokmin took a step back, leaning against a tree trunk, his face pale.

“The opposite. Suho did everything he could to maintain our objectivity. When we were down to the wire, when we had to put the pack on the line to save everything, we didn’t hesitate. We lost our Leader, our Anchor, and our third beta. It felt like someone had ripped our hearts out of our chests and shredded them right in front of us. The day we lost them, we lost everything.”

Joshua turned away and let his eyes close. He hated that he’d been right—they were a pack crumbling from the inside out.

“So you became the pack’s Leader?”

“I had more authority than Duke, Vernon, or Seungcheol, but I deferred to Suho, always. Before, I was our pack’s Guardian. Now I’m both.”