He remained absolutely still as she withdrew, with the utter stillness of catatonia. His posture must have been incredibly painful, but he did not move a muscle to relax it as her weight came off him.

Slowly and gently, she unfastened the ties that kept him prisoner. His wrists were scored almost raw where he'd wrenched at them; they would need attention later in Sickbay, but that could wait.

He still didn't move.

She stood up, and brushed an unsteady hand across her face. This was something she would never have imagined she would have to deal with. One wrong move now, one wrong word or even look, and the thing that had been Lieutenant Malcolm Reed would spend the rest of its life in a mental institution. And she herself had some serious mental adjustments to make.

After a moment, she walked over to her bed and sat down with her back to it. It felt natural to sit cross-legged, so she did. Then, with an effort, she closed her eyes and stilled her mind.

And waited.

During the period of waiting, she gingerly examined the results of her search so far.

Had she had less experience among Humans, the experience would probably have damaged her view of them permanently. She had experienced the killing of Jossen as an emotional shockwave, and had expected something of the same among Reed's memories. It was almost worse to find that no such reaction existed, or ever had.

He was such a moral man that she was unable to process the fact that he had carried out killings with such callous efficiency as his memories suggested. Nothing was what she would have expected from what she knew of him. He had wreaked havoc and death with the calculating savagery of a born killer, caring almost nothing if the innocent died as well. True, afterwards there had been reaction – of a kind – but whatever remorse he felt had fed into a vicious circle of destructiveness and self-loathing. Right from the moment of the cage he had been a person she could barely recognize, and even now she could barely take in the truth.

Enterprise's Chief Tactical Officer had been one of Starfleet's Covert Operations organization's elite of ruthless killers.

An assassin. A murderer.

The contrast was so unimaginable at first that she had pressed deeper, desperate to uncover the secret that must lie behind it. Such behavior was not, could not be natural to him. Something had triggered this. She had to discover what it was.

And now she knew, and the knowledge was almost more than she could bear.

After a very long time, there was the faint sound of movement. Ragged breathing told her that straightening up from that bent-back posture was costly, but when it was achieved there was another silence.

More movement, very quiet. After a minute or two she identified the shuffling sound as that of a man moving around her quarters on all fours. She heard him sniffing. From the direction of the doorway came the distinct sound of several long inhalations, followed by a small, gusty snort.

Footsteps went past. There was a long, low growl, aching with threat. Fortunately whoever it was did not hear; the sound of the footfalls faded into nothing. The growl faded with it.

There was a pause. Then he came back slowly across the room, with hesitations that probably indicated he was examining anything that caught his interest with the wary innocence of any animal in strange surroundings.

Finally he was close enough to touch. With an effort, she kept her hands loosely clasped in her lap. She did not open her eyes: to see him this way would have been an utter violation of his privacy, and more than he could have borne afterwards – if there was an afterwards in which he was capable of understanding anything.

He leaned over and began smelling her. Now he was so close, she could hear his thoughts again, but they were unlike anything she had ever encountered. Instead of being complex they had narrowed down to almost brutal simplicity: it was less like receiving choate thought than pulses of emotion associated with the concepts he identified.

*FearAngerTrappedCuriousFearCurious*, he felt.

She cleared her throat, preparatory to speaking – though what she could say, she had no idea – and he reared back from her, snarling. *AttackAngerFearAngerAngerFear!*

Speech was perhaps not the approach to use. With an enormous mental effort she tried to coalesce her own thoughts into the same primitive form, pushing them into the void in which he now existed. It was extraordinarily difficult, but she achieved something, though not nearly as fluent; she could only hope that he would receive it and listen. *Safe…Friend…Trust.*

The snarl died in his throat. He was silent for a moment, then gave a low, puzzled whine. *No-tailTrustCuriousFear.*

*Safe…Trust,* she managed. *Harmless.* 'Harmless', after all, was probably a more comprehensive concept to his current thought processes than 'Friend'.

Very slowly he came back up to her; he had not retreated far, or else she would have lost the thread of connection. The faintest rumble of a warning growl vibrated from him as he began smelling her again. *SoftHarmlessWeakEat?*

T'Pol swallowed. *FemaleNotEat.*

Unfortunately, the idea that she was female immediately diverted his interest in a most inappropriate direction. She supposed wryly that in view of the fact that on one occasion she had pursued him with her unwanted sexual approaches, this was only 'tit for tat'. However, she resisted firmly, physically as well as mentally: *FemaleNotMate.*

He was clearly disappointed. The small, distant part of her mind that had of necessity remained separate from the experience reflected that there was something quite surreal in having the ship's tactical officer licking her face and whining. However, the sharp aggression of his thought patterns had subsided into gentleness. *AlphaProtectFemale* came on a strong pulse, but it carried overtones of a wish to reassure.

*FemaleTouchAlpha?* she projected.

*WillingHappySafe.*

Nevertheless she was careful to keep her movements slow and gentle, so as not to startle him.

His hair was soft; illogically, she had thought it would be coarse, like that of a sehlat. As soon as the tips of her fingers touched his face, she saw what he saw: a world of green, lush and exotic. *HomeSafe,* he sent.

This was extremely strange. Although she had never visited England, the scenery did not seem to correspond to what she imagined a country on those latitudes would look like. Moreover, the term alpha suggested a position of dominance in a pack, and she did not think that Great Britain still had pack-oriented predators of the Canidae family at large.

Slowly, she changed position. Keeping her fingers touching his skin, she got herself on to all fours beside him. He nuzzled against her, and she felt the contentment coming off him in long, slow waves: *NotAloneSafeAlphaProtectFemale.*

*FemaleWantAlpha.* Her mental touch was hardly more than a whisper.

He did not question this sudden change of heart. With a whimper of eagerness he put a foreleg – his arm – across her back.

*AlphaTrustFemale,* she went on quietly. Using the arm that had been supporting her upper half, she took hold of his tracksuit top and pulled it off him. She felt his puzzlement and disquiet, but he submitted. The rest of his clothes followed, and then so did her own.

It took all of her self-control to keep her eyes tightly shut. The urge to open them came not from prurient curiosity, for she felt none, but from the immediacy of his presence. It conjured up far too many and too vivid memories, and all of them were of a fair-haired man who was as unlike this one as chalk from cheese. It was vital that she keep that particular avenue of thought closed too, because should one wisp of this situation leak through the bond, the damage it would cause would be irreparable.

*AlphaWantingMateFemale.* She was kneeling upright, and her posture perplexed him; he was pushing against her, trying gently to nudge her back onto all fours.

*AlphaTrustFemale.* Instead of complying, she put her hands beneath his armpits and lifted him. Still bewildered, but obedient, he rested his 'paws' on her shoulders. She could feel his puzzled gaze on her, and he leaned forward and licked her nose.

*WantingMate,* he repeated.

*AlphaFeel.* She placed her left hand on his face and let her fingertips follow its contours, sharing the sensation with him. Then she tracked them down his neck, across his shoulders and chest, tracing the smooth skin and sharply-defined musculature, letting each sensation build a picture in his mind. Not the picture that she could see clearly in her mind's eye, of a large canine creature with long silky fur, but of a naked human male.

Trust was ingrained in him towards her. She was his mate, his Dorcha. But fear began to build inside his bewilderment, and a sudden tremor shook his body.

*NotFeel!MateDorcha!* He lunged in panic, trying to subdue her, trying to force her into position. *NotThink!NotFeel!Mate!*

*FeelFemaleNotDorcha!* She grappled with him. Bare skin slid against bare skin. The pulses of emotion pounding into her brain now were as much terror as lust, as he fought down the realization of what his senses were telling him.

He bit down on her shoulder, but a second later, with a wail of anguish, he tried to pull back. Her breasts were pressed against his chest. *DorchaNo-Tail!*

*AlphaNo-Tail!* Her arms were locked around his body. He could not get away from her, however desperately he struggled. Moments later they toppled over, but she still would not permit him to escape. Even the pitiful animal noises of distress he made did not stop her from clamping her hand again over his psi points; for his sake, she could not afford pity.

The state of his mind was now absolutely appalling. It was mostly primal fear, riven with memories of pain and ravenous hunger. The agony of a mangled right wrist flared like a white-hot light in her brain even as he squealed and pulled his arm away from her.

*HungerPainDieFearPainKillObeyEatLiveHungerPainFearDieObeyEatKILL!*

Her mouth was full of fur and hot blood. Her pulse pounded in her ears, and her mind was swamped with anguish and triumph as she experienced the precise moment when his human reasoning had collapsed. The lesson had been learned.

Obey and live!

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