She held it up. Let me see it. Told me what it was. Told me where she’d put it. Saidnowbefore the needle went in.
Dr. Fell never told me first.
Dr. Fell told me after, if she told me at all, and the explanation wasn’t for me. It was for the file. For the record. For the neat columns of data that charted response times, suppression thresholds, and how much voltage it took to keep me down. She’d write her notes while I was still shaking, the pen scratching across paper, her voice flat and clinical as she narrated what she’d done like I wasn’t in the room.
Sable looked me in the eye.
She gave me a warning she didn’t have to give.
The drug pulls harder now. The room recedes. The crack in the ceiling blurs. The dead bulb becomes two, then three, then a smear of light I can’t focus on.
But the wool is still rough under my fingers.
I think about her wrist. The bones were small. Bird bones. Hollow. The skin was thin enough that I could see the veins running blue underneath, and I could’ve closed my fist and ended something.
The wolf wanted to hold on.
Not to hurt. To keep.
The distinction is jarring. The facility taught my hands two things: force or release. Grip until they sedate you or let go when the pain stops. There isn’t a third option between those two things. There isn’t a grip that just…holds.
But I found one.
I held her. I didn’t break her. I let go when she asked.
My fingers open on the blanket. Stay open. The tremor is gone. My palm rests flat against the wool, and the wool is rough and real and warm. Someone tucked it around my shoulders, and the someone was her.
Time doesn’t work right. It didn’t work right in the facility, either. Days blurred into tests, tests into restraints, restraints into the flat certainty that fighting only made the next dose stronger, and stopping didn’t make any of it end. But I stopped today, and the punishment didn’t come.
No table.
No humming equipment.
No hands forcing me down while the needle found the port they’d carved into my arm.
She stepped back. She put the needle where she said she would. Her voice shook—just once, just at the edge—and she did it anyway.
I think about her palm on my chest.
The vibration.
The pull.
The drug drags me deeper. The room goes soft at the corners, soft at the edges, soft everywhere except the place in my chest where the warmth is lodged.
My hand lies open on the blanket.
I can still feel the shape of her wrist in my palm. The small bones. The beat of her pulse. The moment my fingers unlocked one by one because she asked, and some part of me wanted to be the kind of thing that could answer.
Wait.
Her voice goes down with me.
So does the choice.
Not the needle. Not the room. Not the lock.
That.
