I need to stop.
I need to find his name. He needs his identity back.
I turn toward the door.
The lock clicks behind me.
I don’t move away at first. My hand stays on the key, fingers closed around the bit of metal that decides whether he gets walls or sky.
Dane’s word follows me into the corridor.
Suspension.
Not healing. Not rest.
Behind the door, his breathing continues in that slow, drugged rhythm I’ve written down so many times it should feel ordinary by now. It doesn’t. It sounds mechanical. Managed. A body kept in place because nobody knows what to do with the man inside it.
The key is warm when I slide it into my pocket.
I have to find another way.
Chapter 4
Him
White light. That’s the first thing. Always the first thing. White light bleeding through closed eyelids, the kind that doesn’t cast shadows because there’s nowhere for shadows to go.
I’m on the table. Steel beneath my spine, cold enough to burn. Restraints across my chest, my wrists, my ankles; something synthetic that doesn’t give when I pull. I always pull.
The hum starts next. Low. Equipment warming up somewhere to my left, outside my field of vision.
Footsteps. Deliberate. In no hurry.
“Good morning, 3-0-6-7-0.”
Dr. Fell’s voice. The voice that explains what’s coming before she does it, as if narration makes it clean.
I don’t answer. I never answer. I stopped speaking after the first few months because it never made a difference. Cursing, pleading, screaming…it’s just background noise in this place where screams ring out daily.
Her fingers find my wrist. Two fingers. Counting. The same position as the other woman’s, but slower. Her thumb traces the vein before she settles into the count. She does this every time—the extra touch, the unnecessary drag of skin on skin. Her hand is cool and steady, and there’s nothing clinical about the way it lingers. It turns my stomach.
“Your vitals are stable. Heart rate elevated, but that’s expected.” The pen scratches. “We’ll proceed with today’s session.”
She moves to my left side. I feel her adjusting something on the equipment—a dial turning, a switch clicking into position. Then her fingers at my temple, placing the electrode. She doesn’t need to touch my hair to do this, but she does anyway, pushing it back, her thumb following the line of my jaw, resting there a beat too long before she pulls back. My skin crawls where she touched it. My wolf snarls from somewhere the restraints can’t reach.
She ignores the snarl. She always ignores the snarl. I think it’s part of what she likes. Knowing that I’m at her mercy and there’s nothing I can do about it.
“Subject 3-0-6-7-=0. Frequency extraction, day eighty-seven. Neural mapping concurrent. Administering stimulus in three…two…”
The sound hits first.
A tone. One note forced into my skull from the equipment overhead. It gets into my teeth, my ribs, the plates of my skull. My body answers before I can stop it.
That’s what they want.
Not the tone. What the tone drags out of me.
The hum tears up from somewhere below my sternum, pulled hard and wrong, like something hooked through the bone. It pushes against the restraints. Against the runes. Against every carved barrier they put in my skin to keep it contained.
