To say the following hours after the makeshift meal were awkward would be a gross oversimplification for the weird tension in the room. 

This was a position that Sora had never experienced before, back at hunter headquarters there was a clear demarcation between Sora and the rest. Neither liked each other and survival required exuding a constant air threatening violence. She knew they held her family over her head but she did not want to give up anymore power in the dynamic. Not letting her actual desperation through Sora maintained her tense persona constantly.  The nervous anger, like a cornered prey, held together solely by fear, had her wound up so tightly that her defense mechanism became the only thing she knew. 

Right now she was out of her depth. 

This could be a clear out, if she was selfish enough to take the chance of changing her life. Now what that exactly entailed, she did not know. But now there was something else, than the constant pressure of trying to hold what was left of her family together. 

This new development touched a deep resentment of her situation she didn’t even know she had. Maybe the possibility of getting out of the hunters control was something she had never even dared to dream of. 

Her future had seemed to set in stone and her paths so black and white. 

Do what they say so that her mother and brother could continue to live. 

Now, what would happen if she gave in to some selfish part of her and just left them behind. The quota be damned. 

Maybe the hunters would think she died in the woods. It’s not like she had to stay here with this pack of shifters too, maybe she could just leave by herself. 

She didn’t need to feel guilty if they all thought she had died, the couldn’t really hurt her mom for that reason not like they would if she just got up and left before. 

But that also meant she would need to go into hiding and then definitely could not entertain the thought of staying with this pack. However weirdly nice they were treating her right now. 

Another question she didn’t know the answer to was if she could live with the guilt of knowingly abandoning her family. It was never her burden to take up per say but that's just how the cards were dealt. It was the unfair circumstances surrounding her family, the brazen ambition and the death of her pack which led to the fate of her family falling into the hands of the hunters. 

Moreover, it was her younger self's naive belief that if she did what they told her they would eventually let them go. 

A couple years in and she had come to realize that they would never let her and her brother go. 

It was too good of a deal for the hunters to have full grown shifters who they could send out to attack other shifters at their disposal. Self sacrificing weapons. That’s what they had become. 

Heightened strength and reflexes outmatched the technology any hunters could rely on. And even if either Sora or Suho got hurt, they didn’t need to worry about sparing any of their healing supplies. 

Mistakes just ended up increasing their quota, and the siblings slowly found themselves accumulating more life debt to the hunters which they would never be able to pay off. 

Sora had an out now. 

Maybe. 

If she felt like she was a selfish enough person to only care about her survival. 

This line of thinking brought her back to the present, shaking her head as her eyes came into focus after coming back from being lost in thought. 

She was sitting on a lumpy green sofa, the stuffing in the cushions uneven from years of supporting heavy weight. Male shifters could grow very large. 

She was sitting across from Tao, who kept his body facing the old television playing some movie she had never seen before but reminded her of something she would watch as a child. She could feel him try to sneak glances at her from the corner of his eyes, which she chose to pointedly ignore. 

She needed more time to process what exactly he meant in her life and what he represented. 

Not thinking about that seemed better. She needed to think about her next moves, not a happily ever after fantasy. 

It was clear to her that the house she was in was a domestic space, a pack house on the smaller side but clearly old. 

Probably a side house of a larger pack that was given to the young men so that they could have privacy and space from living with the larger pack. But that meant that there was a larger pack that these guys were a part of. Which then begged the question, how far away was this larger pack and how did the hunters miss this? Were they so large that they could afford to have a group of pack members far out from the central house while still being confident in managing their territory? A pack that was structured and powerful would have needed to be old, you can’t amass that sort of control without decades of establishing territory. 

He snorted. 

That brought her back to the present again. 

Guess he was actually paying attention to the movie as well as looking at her. 

“Did you see that?” 

“No.” she responded slightly clipped. 

“Oh well, it was super funny. The woman just,” he paused, “well never mind. Do you, maybe, want to