"She's crying and confused in there," Kyungsoo said slowly. "And we're standing out here, twiddling our thumbs. What's wrong with this picture?" His hands were shoved in his pockets and his face was schooled into a neutral expression, but his words bit with anger.

"This is seriously getting old, don't you think?" He continued before anyone could answer. "Time and time again, it seems that we are at the mercy of this stupid war and puppets to the Council. I mean, it's honestly hard to believe that they didn't know this was going to happen. They've been selling her like some lupine Jesus Christ, and everyone is just eating it up like, well, like wolves!"

Tao couldn't help but nod his head along to his gege's rant. He usually tried to be pretty down the middle about these things, but Jinri was important to him, and he could tell that despite their support and her patience, she was slowly breaking under the pressure of all of this. He was worried about her, but he was also worried about his brothers. Since they were young, they had known about all of this, had shared the burden of being a wolf. When Jinri had come into the picture, it was both a blessing and a curse. They had discovered so many new things about the world they lived in as Ulrica, but they had become more aware of the isolation that came with it. From his perspective, things had always been just them. They had families that they were from, lives that they led, but it paled in comparison to the bond they shared as a pack. 

For Tao, the eleven men standing in the hallway around him were closer than his actual family. He loved his dear mother, but she never gave him the same attention as his brothers who were bigger and faster and stronger than him. She loved him to the best of her ability, but he could never live up to the standard Suming and Ziming set. He had taken up wushu as an outlet for his anger and feelings of rejection. He remembered Ziming laughing at the thought of his shrimp brother being anything but the runt of the litter. This only spurred Tao to train harder, become the best. His wolf was the same way; he took everything so seriously and didn't take the time to enjoy his childhood. When Kris came along and offered him a spot in his pack, Tao was wary at first. Wasn't he just another guy bigger and stronger looking to ? Tao wasn't good enough for a pack, he'd always been told. But Kris was serious, and Tao stuck to the tall guy like glue. He found that with Kris and soon the others, he was able to be light and free and childish. He was thick as thieves with Kai and Sehun, and looked up to the elder pack members like the brothers Ziming and Suming should have been.

Their stories were all similar, he came to find out. Chanyeol had a loving family that had grown apart due to an accident none of them could've controlled. Kyungsoo had been bullied by his classmates because he was the product of his mother's affair. Lay was lost both of his parents when he was really young and had been living in an orphanage in Changsha, China before the council found him and sent him to live with an elderly wolf couple from Busan. Suho was the oldest of his brothers and had so much pressure on his shoulders to marry well and carry on the family name. Xiumin, Suho's cousin, was an outcast because of his rather cold and aloof made him hard to be around. Baekhyun was loud and boisterous because, like Tao, he was always in the shadow of his prodigy older brother. Chen had never known his birth parents, but had been adopted by a wolf couple who had a hard time controlling his rambunctious nature, leading him to be a delinquent from a young age. Sehun was from a very prominent Ulrica family, and had lost his older sister as a result of her status as a Tamer; his parent’s denial and blind allegiance to the council is what pushed him away. Kai had parents who cared for him, but who were not wolves or tamers, so he felt as if he could never be totally close with them about his situation. Finally, there was Luhan, who always had other people