The flashbacks come in waves. Not full memories; fragments. Dr. Fell’s cool fingers on my wrist. The tone climbing. The runes burning along my forearms. My back arching off the table. Her voice, clinical and calm, reciting data while my body tears itself apart.
I press my palms against my eyes. The shift flickers across my jaw, teeth crowding, then receding. Crowding. Receding. The wolf is fighting the wards and losing, and it makes him desperate, and desperate is what breaks things.
I stand. Pace. The room is ten feet square. Six steps one way, six steps the other. The cameras are watching; I can feel their hum in the walls.
Let them watch.
Let them see a man walking in a cage instead of tearing it apart. That’s progress.
But by the third hour, the pacing isn’t helping. My hands won’t stop shaking. The shift is coming in longer pulses now, my shoulders thickening, my spine aching where the wolf pushes against the shape of the man. The wards press it back down each time, and each time the suppression feels like a hand on my throat.
Take your mind out of the room.
I think about the cave. The fire. Her face in the light. Her skin beneath my fingertips. Sable.
Mate.
The word surfaces in a moment when the control cracks and the man underneath shows through. It’s not a thought I chose. It’s a word the wolf has been carrying since Ravenclaw, heavy and certain, and the man has been too busy surviving to hear it.
She explained it by the fire:Your wolf knows. You can’t fight it. It’s like gravity.
My wolf knew before I opened my eyes. Before I remembered my name. Before I understood what language was for or why one voice in the dark mattered more than breathing.
The realization doesn’t calm me. It makes the white room worse. Because she’s out there somewhere—in this building, on the other side of walls I can’t break—and the wolf can’t reach her and the man can’t either. The wards are pressing the shift down, and the ceiling is white, and the air is sealed and—
I hit the glass.
My fist connects once, and the impact shudders up my arm. I pull back and look at my hand. Human. The knuckles are red, but the skin isn’t broken.
I hit it again. Harder. The glass doesn’t crack; it’s reinforced, warded, built for this. But the sound of it—the dull, flat thud of flesh against barrier—fills the room.
“Sable!” Her name scrapes out of me. Not the quiet way I said it in the cave. Raw. “SABLE!”
The glass doesn’t answer. Nothing answers.
“Fuck,” I groan. I press my forehead against the glass, my hands flat on the cold surface. The shift flickers hard now, jaw aching, shoulders humping, claws pushing out and retracting with each breath. The cameras are recording all of it.
I don’t care.
My wolf answers the room with a howl.
It drags through me, long and low, raw enough to scrape my throat, though I never open my mouth. It isn’t force. It isn’tcontrol. It’s the sound of an animal searching for the one thing it can’t survive without.
Time passes. I don’t know how much. The light doesn’t change. The wards keep cycling, and my body cycles with them: control when the man surfaces long enough to breathe, then the wolf surging hard enough that the shift takes half my face before the wards shove it back.
Then footsteps hit the corridor beyond the glass. Fast. More than one set.
A door opens on the other side of the observation panel, and her scent reaches me all at once, not thinned by vents or carried through seams in the walls.
Full. Sudden. Hers.
I go still.
Her voice comes next, muffled through the glass but unmistakable.
“He’s awake?” Urgent. Directed at someone else. “How long has he been awake? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
Another voice: lower, calmer. “He’s been conscious for approximately four hours. The medical team was monitoring—”
