Twisted bitch.
“She does care about him,” Dr. Fell says to Viktor as the officer takes my arm. Her voice is warm with something that sounds like generosity. “That’s not nothing. But caring and understanding are different things. I understand what he is. She just loves him.”
The word “loves” in her mouth. Said like a diagnosis. A weakness she’s identified and filed away for later use.
And it’s a word that hasn’t even entered my thoughts yet.
The officer walks me back down the corridor. I don’t fight him. The shaking has gotten worse. If I open my mouth, I’ll say something that can’t be taken back, and Viktor is standing next to a woman who speaks in calm sentences and makes ownership sound like medicine.
Nadia is waiting at the stairwell.
“I’ll take this from here.” She nods at the officer, who slants a look at me, then turns and walks away.
“I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“I had no choice.”
She falls into step beside me. We walk in silence for a full corridor before she speaks.
“What did she say?”
“She thinks he’s a malfunctioning system. She said I’m the variable that destabilized her design. She told Viktor that caring about someone isn’t the same as understanding them.” I hear myself list it out as if I’m giving a patient handover. Symptom. Cause. Likely progression. “She’s going to get access to him, Nadia. She’s going to stand in front of Viktor and offer him twenty-four lives and speak in that gentle voice, and he’s going to think about those families in Syndicate detention. She’s going to win.”
Nadia doesn’t tell me I’m wrong. That’s what makes the floor feel suddenly unsteady beneath me.
“I can’t let her take him back.”
“I know.”
“I can’t sit around and wait for a decision. If Viktor trades him—” My voice breaks on the word. I swallow it down. “Nadia, if there’s a chance he’s going to take that deal, I have to get Rafael out before it happens. Not after. Before.”
Nadia walks in silence for several steps. I can see her thinking. Her jaw tight, her eyes straight ahead. She’s not a woman who makes decisions fast. She’s a woman who makes them once.
“There’s a shift change at oh-two-hundred,” she says. Quiet. “The containment level runs a skeleton crew for forty minutes while the night team processes in. The service corridor on sublevel two connects to the medical loading bay. Bay three has a transport van. Keys in the visor.”
My chest empties. Fills again.
“The suppression wards cycle down during shift change,” she goes on. “Ninety-second window before they reset. The restraint buckles are standard medical grade. You’ve worked with them before.”
“I have.”
“I’m not promising anything. I’m not offering to help. I’m telling you what the schedule looks like.” She stops walking. Looks at me. “And I’m telling you I believe you when you say what that woman did wasn’t research.”
I hold her eyes.
“Oh-two-hundred,” I say.
She nods once. Walks away.
I go back to my room, sit on the bed in the dark with my hands between my knees, and count the hours until two a.m.
Seven hours and forty-six minutes.
Seven hours and forty-six minutes until I walk into a cell where a man has been forced to relive everything that made his feral wolf the only way to survive.
I don’t know what I’ll find when I open that door.
I don’t know if the wolf will know me anymore. Not after being locked up with her again.
