1

There was a beast in their basement.

Jules Blake had learned about it completely by accident. He had been looking for his kitten Sheba, and after fruitlessly searching the entire house, Jules had decided to check out the basement no one ever used. His hopes hadn’t been high—the basement was so cold, dark, and damp that even his not-very-bright kitten should have been smarter than to go there—but when Jules got downstairs, he was surprised to find security guards at the door. Armed security guards.

There were suspicious noises coming from behind the door. Growls? Had someone just screamed? The guards’ eyes were wary and troubled, their hands close to their holsters. It was beyond strange, considering that the basement door was massive. Nothing should be able to break through that door. Why were the guards so twitchy, then?

“What’s going on?” Jules asked, taking a step closer.

The guards blocked his way.

“Stay away from the basement, kid,” one of them said. “Your uncle’s orders.”

“Not a kid,” Jules said, scowling—he was nineteen; an adult!—but of course the guard didn’t take him seriously.

“Shoo,” he said, giving him an amused smile before turning away, silently dismissing him.

That was the thing: no one ever took Jules seriously. For that matter, no one had ever paid him much attention. He just wasn’t remarkable in any way. He wasn’t the eldest and strongest child: that was his half-brother Anthony. He wasn’t the youngest or the smartest: that was the seventeen-year-old Eric. He wasn’t the beautiful one: that would be Liam, with his gorgeous golden hair and golden-brown eyes.

He was just Jules: the ordinary, boring Julian Blake. The unremarkable child. The one people barely looked at before shifting their eyes to his brothers. It wasn’t that he was ugly or anything. He was just… mundane compared to his siblings. Nothing special. His brown eyes and brown hair were not terrible, Jules supposed, and his skin was nice, but that was it. He was hardly the type of omega who turned people’s heads when he walked down the street.

It was fine. Jules was perfectly content being the plain one, even if he sometimes felt like a piece of furniture when Liam was in the room. It was okay. It wasn’t Liam’s fault that he was so gorgeous. Besides, pretty much everyone looked like furniture when Liam was around; Jules wasn’t special in that regard.

Anyway. The point was, he was the Blake sibling people always remembered as an afterthought. Jules was pretty sure the security guard had already forgotten that he’d just seen him.

Jules scowled at the man’s wide back before staring at the basement door, his curiosity piqued.

He really, really wanted to know what they were guarding. Just one little peek. Surely there was no harm in it?

All right, maybe there would be some harm in it—if his uncle found out, his reaction wouldn’t be pretty. Wayne Blake was anything but lenient. If Uncle Wayne wanted them to stay away from the basement, being his nephew wouldn’t save Jules from punishment.

Unless he didn’t get caught.

***

It had taken Jules days of careful observation before he learned when the guards changed shifts. The guards always seemed more lax and easily distracted when their shift neared its end. He’d also learned that the basement locked from the outside and, to Jules’s relief, thanks to the lock type, it wouldn’t be noticeable when the door wasn’t locked.

After some strategic maneuvering, which might or might not have involved bribing Liam to bat his eyelashes at the guards and request their help (Liam’s pretty face could be so useful sometimes), Jules sneaked into the basement, his heart beating wildly with excitement, nerves, and anxiety.

He had half-expected the basement to be dark and creepy, with some dangerous beast locked up in a cage or something.

But the basement wasn’t dark.

It was fully illuminated. In fact, it seemed to have been transformed into… some kind of lab?

Jules looked around with a frown, utterly confused. His uncle was a businessman, not a scientist of any kind.

Slowly, he moved deeper into the large room, looking around warily. But there was no beast anywhere. He didn’t understand. Then what had been making such a ruckus? Was that not—

Something growled, and Jules came to an abrupt halt, his head whipping toward the sound.

He stared.

There was a naked man strapped down to a metal table.

That was his first impression. It was a wrong one. Because it was no man. It was a Xeus alpha. A Xeus alpha in shifted form.

Moistening his dry lips with his tongue, Jules walked closer, curious despite himself. He’d never seen a shifted Xeus. Heck, he’d never really been allowed to go anywhere near Xeus alphas, period. Filth, Uncle Wayne had called them. Abominations. Omegas from good families like ours stay away from those animals.

Jules had never had a reason to doubt his uncle’s words. He’d never spoken to a Xeus in the nineteen years of his life, so his uncle was surely more informed than him on the subject—Jules had never even left the family estate. His mother had been old-fashioned that way: unmated omegas were not to leave their childhood homes until they were presented to high society. Jules had been supposed to be presented last year, but then his mother died and…

Swallowing, Jules pushed the thought away. This wasn’t the time for moping.

He studied the alpha curiously.

The Xeus was… large. He was pure muscle everywhere, powerfully built, with a dark trail of hair leading downward to a—

Flushing, Jules tore his eyes away. He felt a mix of embarrassed, flustered, and painfully curious. He’d never been so close to a naked man. But was a transformed Xeus a “man”? Most of him looked like one, but the long, scary-looking claws at the tips of the Xeus’s fingers seemed to point toward the answer being “no.” The alpha’s face was very ugly, his features vaguely male but distorted into something predatory and beastly. Dark, fur-like facial hair obscured his features. And those eyes… those glowing green eyes that were tracking Jules’s every movement didn’t seem entirely sentient, though they were oddly attentive for a simpleminded beast.

The Xeus emanated strength and virility, which was probably why it took Jules a while to realize that he was hurt. There were bruises and cuts all over the alpha, and there was a wound on his left arm, long and jagged, still bleeding sluggishly. It looked like… like someone had literally peeled the skin off his bicep. No one had even bothered to bandage the wound, probably expecting the Xeus’s superior healing to do the job—eventually.

Nausea rose to Jules’s throat. Was his uncle responsible for this? Why would Uncle Wayne even keep the Xeus here? Chained, obviously against his will? Even if his uncle was right and Xeus alphas were more animals than men, even animals didn’t deserve being hurt and experimented on—and this lab was clearly used for some kind of experiments on the Xeus. There were a lot of blood samples in the containers around the table.

“Hello?” Jules said, hesitantly. “Do you understand me?”

The alpha just stared at him, his glowing eyes narrowed, his nostrils flaring.

Jules was a little unnerved, to be honest, and he was kind of glad that the chains would stop the Xeus from attacking him. Immediately, he felt terrible for thinking it. No one deserved to be treated like that. No one.

Jules took another step closer. “You don’t understand me, do you?” He sighed. This was so confusing. Xeus—the moon—wasn’t in its full phase. This alpha shouldn’t have been in this state. To Jules’s knowledge, Xeus alphas weren’t supposed to be able to shift into their beastly forms when their moon wasn’t full. Some Xeus alphas could supposedly use their claws outside the full moon, but they shouldn’t have been able to transform their faces like this. This was just bizarre.

Frowning, Jules eyed the alpha curiously. “Well, you’re clearly in no state to tell me why you’re like this.” He wondered if the Xeus could smell how confused and nervous he was. Probably. Jules had heard that Xeus alphas’ senses were very heightened compared to non-shifter alphas and omegas.

Jules smiled ruefully, meeting the Xeus’s eyes. “Fuck, I’m really out of my depth here, to be honest. I didn’t expect—I didn’t expect you at all. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now.” Just leaving and pretending that he hadn’t seen the Xeus in their basement seemed… wrong. Cruel. But what was he supposed to do? He couldn’t exactly confront his uncle about it. He couldn’t tell him to release the Xeus. Just imagining it made Jules cringe. He liked to think he wasn’t a coward, but there was bravery and then there was stupidity.

Uncle Wayne wasn’t one to tolerate questions. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t the master of the house yet, but with their parents dead and their eldest brother gone, Uncle Wayne was their legal guardian and the de facto alpha of their family. And the thing was, at this point, they weren’t even sure Anthony was alive. He’d been gone for so long Jules could barely remember his eldest brother’s face. He’d been only four when Anthony had left for the war. Well, the war had been over for a few months now, but they still had no news about Anthony. If he didn’t return soon, he was likely dead—and their uncle would become the master of the house. The Blake estate was entailed to alphas. With the three younger Blake siblings being omegas, they couldn’t inherit it and would be completely at their uncle’s mercy if Anthony was declared dead.

A growl snapped Jules out of his thoughts.

He flinched, looking at the Xeus warily. The alpha had his teeth bared, his muscles straining and pulling at the manacles.

“Shit, stop—” Jules winced as the alpha’s wrists started bleeding. “You’re only hurting yourself!” He grabbed his arm.

The alpha went rigid, his glowing green eyes fixing on Jules again.

His heart hammering, Jules swallowed. Despite the Xeus being restrained, Jules suddenly felt like prey. But he didn’t let go of the alpha’s arm, just gentled his touch a little. “You’re hurting yourself,” he repeated, softer. “I doubt they’ll break, no matter how strong you are. Look, I promise I’ll try to help you.”

The Xeus glowered at him, his harsh breathing the only sound in the room. But he did stop thrashing. Could he understand him after all?

Jules cocked his head to the side. “Can you understand me?”

The Xeus just kept looking at him with the same unnervingly intense, not-quite-rational look. His muscles were very tense despite him being still. He wasn’t relaxed by any means. He looked like an animal ready to attack at any moment. A cornered, wounded animal.

Wounded animals were dangerous and unpredictable; that much Jules knew.

Jules looked around until he found a bottle of blood stancher. Clicking his tongue in disgust—why wouldn’t his uncle’s people use it on the Xeus when they had it right there?—Jules grabbed it and headed back to the alpha. He hesitated, meeting the hostile gaze. He was soft-heartened, not suicidal.

“I don’t mean you any harm,” he said, keeping his voice as non-threatening as possible. “Will you let me treat your wounds? That gash on your arm looks nasty.”

The Xeus didn’t reply, but his body language didn’t become more hostile, either.

All right.

Jules moved closer.

The alpha was still watching Jules warily, but he didn’t even flinch when Jules applied the medicine to the wound on his arm. Jules was pleased when the blood stancher did its job quickly and the wound finally stopped bleeding.

“Here we go,” Jules mumbled, glancing back at the alpha.

The Xeus was still staring at him.

Okay, this was starting to get a little creepy.

Wetting his lips, Jules stared back. Those glowing eyes were oddly entrancing: scary but transfixing too. It was incredibly hard to look away, his senses sharpening and focusing only on those eyes. He felt—

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and Jules wrenched his gaze away, feeling a little disoriented.

Right. His phone.

It was a message from Liam, warning him that Jules didn’t have much time before the guards would return.

“I have to go,” Jules said, lifting his gaze from his phone. “I need to go before I’m caught.”

The alpha growled.

“I’ll be back,” Jules said. “I’ll help you escape, I promise.”

The Xeus didn’t reply, looking at him with freakish intensity. It made Jules’s stomach clench and his heart beat fast in his chest for no damn reason. Was it fear he was feeling? He wasn’t sure.

By the time he returned to his room, his heart was still beating too fast. He felt confused, flustered, and very lost.

His kitten was on his bed, kneading her claws into the duvet. Because of course she was.

“This is all your fault,” Jules said.

Sheba meowed.