I eat the soup. It’s lukewarm and bland, and my stomach cramps around the first mouthful because it’s been too long. I eat it anyway. Drink the water. Tear the bread into pieces and chew each one slowly because my body has forgotten how to do this without complaint.
Then I sit on the bed and stare at the wall.
The room is warm. The sheets are clean. The window shows a dark sky with no stars. Somewhere below me, Rafael is in a bare room. He’s breathing the slow, mechanical breaths of a body held under by drugs, and when he wakes up, the first thing he’ll see is the same featureless blank that ate five years of his life. And I won’t be there to tell him where he is. I won’t be there to saymorningand watch his eyes find mine and see the man surface behind the wolf.
He’ll wake up alone. In a facility. Again.
My wolf presses against my ribs so hard my skin prickles. I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and breathe.
Nadia said six. That’s eight hours away.
lie down. I don’t sleep. I stare at the ceiling and count the seconds until they become minutes, and then minutes become hours.
The building never settles. Wards press through the walls. Generators cycle somewhere below the residential level. Behind all of it is the quiet machinery of a place built to hold things that shouldn’t get out.
I close my eyes and think about a cave where a man built a fire and said my name and kissed me in the light of it.
Eight hours.
I can survive eight hours.
Chapter 19
Rafael
White walls.
The panic hits before the thought completes, and I’m gasping. My body is off the cot and against the far wall with my back to the corner and my hands up before my eyes have focused. The position is instinct…facility instinct, five years of waking to white and knowing what follows.
White ceiling. White floor. Overhead light, even and shadowless. The smell of antiseptic and unnatural air, the chemical nothingness that means sealed rooms and monitoring equipment and cold hands with scalpels.
My hands are shaking. I check them. No restraints. No IV line. There are marks on my arms from when they took me, but nobody’s strapped me down.
Not yet.
The wolf slams forward. The shift threatens my jaw, my shoulders, the nails thickening on my hands. Every instinct saysbreak. Run. Find her.
I hold.
Not easily. The hold costs me; my teeth ache from clenching, my arms are rigid, and every muscle in my body is braced for the table, the tone, Dr. Fell’s fingers on my jaw. But I hold, because the man who soothed a bear and saved a woman on a mountain isn’t the same man they put in here. The facility broke that man apart. This man has been putting himself back together for three days, and the pieces fit differently now.
Think. Read the room. Don’t just react.
The room is ten feet square. Observation glass along one wall, dark on the other side, one-way. I can’t see through it, but I know someone’s watching. There’s medical equipment mounted on the far wall. A monitoring station. A tray on a table with instruments I don’t look at. Steel restraints on a rack in the corner. Not on me. Waiting.
I close my eyes. Try to breathe.
The power rests low in my chest, quiet for now.
I don’t shove it outward the way I did in the transport. I let it open slowly, the way I listened for water in the mountain and air moving through stone.
The room answers.
Suppression wards run through the concrete, woven into the walls at a frequency meant to smother a wolf’s shift before it can take hold. I feel them against my skin, flat and cold, but they aren’t seamless. They cycle.
Eight seconds of pressure.
A fractional drop.
