Then I leave the room and lock the door.
In the corridor, I stand with the key still in my hand. The healers’ wing is awake now. Someone coughs in the far room. A basin clatters. Greta’s voice carries from the side entrance,low and irritated, which means someone has tried to refuse breakfast.
Normal sounds. The compound doing what a compound does when nobody is watching the woman in the corridor press her thumb into the red marks around her wrist until they hurt.
He could have broken it. He could have dragged me under him, torn the door from its frame, gone through the wing before anyone reached us. The fact that he didn’t isn’t safety. I know that.
But in that room, for one instant, the most dangerous wolf in Ravenclaw heard one word from me and stopped.
I tuck the key under my collar. I will tell Brenna if it happens again. I go back to the dispensary, wash my hands, and watch the water turn clear around them.
My wrist aches under the stream, and my wolf is pressed so far forward against my skin that I can feel her teeth.
What the hell happened to me in there?
The water runs clear.
My hands are shaking.
Chapter 7
Him
The drug hooks into my bloodstream and pulls.
I go down in layers. The ceiling blurs first—water stains, a crack running corner to corner, the light fixture with one dead bulb. Then the walls. Then the edges of the room soften.
But the fragments don’t line up.
Her wrist in my hand. Thin. Warm. The bones shifting under my grip.
The syringe.
Her voice.
Wait.
Backward now—my palm flat against her spine, the heat of her skin through fabric, her pulse kicking against my thumb. I wasn’t counting it. But my body was.
The drug spreads cold through my veins, thick as syrup, but the memory cuts through it.
Wait.
One word. No command behind it. No white coats. No restraints. No humming equipment and the taste of blood in the back of my throat.
She asked. Gently.
My hand opens on the blanket. Closes. Opens again.
The motion belongs to me. A small act of autonomy that’s becoming more and more frequent.
I count it. One. Two. Three. Like measures. Like the downbeat before the orchestra comes in, except I can’t remember where I learned that. Can’t remember the room with tall windows or the scuffed floor or the way afternoon light fell across music stands. It’s just there. The counting. The rhythm. The reflex my hands remember even when my mind can’t understand why.
But before the syringe…warm water.
Cloth on my skin.
Her hands.
