Then pressure again.
Every eighth second, the room gives me a crack.
I keep my eyes closed and follow the rest. The monitoring equipment runs higher, sharper: two units mounted on the wall to my left, one in the ceiling, and a sensor cluster behind the observation glass. They’re reading my heart rate, my brain activity, probably whatever output I now recognize as my magic.
Let them read.
I’m not breaking anything.
Not yet.
They won’t see me lose it.
Think, Rafael. Where are you?
The ventilation system runs through the ceiling. Three intake vents, one exhaust. I can feel the airflow: recycled, filtered, stripped of everything except the chemical clean. No scent gets in or out through that system. It’s designed that way. You don’t let a wolf scent the outside world when you’re trying to keep him contained.
But the system isn’t perfect. There’s a gap in the filtration, a joint in the ductwork above the observation glass where the seal has deteriorated. Not much. A hairline. Enough that if I press my awareness toward it, I can catch the faintest trace of what’s in the corridor beyond.
Concrete. Steel. More cleaning solution. The residual scent of wolves—multiple, layered, the markers of staff who walk these halls every day.
No soap. No herbs. No warm woman undertone.
She’s not here.
Not close.
The wolf howls. Not the vibration from my chest…a howl. Raw, long, the sound a wolf makes when it can’t find the one it’s looking for. It builds in my chest and pushes against my locked jaw, and I swallow it because if I let it out, the equipment will spike and people will come through that door with darts and gas, and the cycle will repeat.
She’s alive. She was screaming when they darted you. Screaming and fighting. They didn’t hurt her. She was fighting to get to you, not to get away.
The memory surfaces, jagged and incomplete. The clearing. The operatives. His hand on her arm. The shift taking me. Her voice—Rafael, don’t—and then the darts, and the snow against my cheek, and her name getting further away.
For one second, the thought surfaces:She brought me here.
My wolf shreds it.
The rejection is visceral. A snarl so deep my ribs ache with it. She stayed when she could’ve left. She let a helicopter fly past. She slept in my arms and saidwe’ll find itwith a certainty that had nothing to do with music and everything to do with a future she was putting both of us in.
She didn’t hand me back to the white room. Someone took us both.
I open my eyes. The room is the same. White. Still. The glass dark and watching.
I sit on the floor against the wall. Cross my legs. Rest my hands on my knees, palms up. The position is deliberate…calm, patient. If they’re watching through the glass, they’ll see a man sitting quietly with his hands open. Not a weapon. Not a feral wolf pacing a cage.
A man. Waiting.
The first hour, I hold.
I sit against the wall. Hands open on my knees. The man in control. The wolf pressed flat underneath, snarling but contained. I count the suppression ward cycles—eight seconds per pulse, seven pulses per minute.
Calm. Stay calm.
The second hour, the white room starts to win.
It’s not one thing. It’s everything. The shadowless light that never changes. The antiseptic smell that lives in the back of mythroat. The sealed air cycling through vents that strip out every scent except chemical nothingness. The monitoring equipment blinking its silent record of my body’s involuntary responses.
I know these walls. My skin knows them. Five years of rooms like this, and the body doesn’t forget what happened inside them just because the man can build a fire and save a woman on a mountain.
