My clawed hands curl against the restraint cuffs, closing before I can stop them. The man who built the fire, who touched Sable’s face with his fingertips, is still somewhere underneath, reaching for the surface.
But the body remembers the table.
The tone.
The cool fingers on my throat.
Dr. Fell is walking the same corridors, breathing the same air, and my hands won’t open.
Chapter 22
Sable
The room they’ve given me has a window that doesn’t open and a door that locks from the outside.
Nobody said that out loud. The lock is quiet, a soft electronic click when Nadia closed the door behind me. The kind you could miss if you weren’t listening. I was listening.
Six hours since the gas took Rafael. Six hours in this room with its clean sheets and sealed window and the flat gray light of an afternoon that won’t end.
I’ve showered. Changed into the clothes they left: sweatpants, a long-sleeved shirt that smells like laundry detergent. Eaten half a sandwich from a tray that had been here when I returned. Sat on the bed. Stood up. Sat again.
My hands won’t stop shaking.
Not enough for anyone else to notice, maybe. But I notice the tremor when I pick up the glass. When I fold my arms. WhenI press my palms flat against my thighs and still feel the flutter under my skin.
My wolf is pressing forward against my ribs, and the urgency has nothing to do with the shift. It is all Rafael. Two floors below me. Drugged, contained, and waking in the place I was supposed to protect him from.
You walked away because staying would have made it worse.
I repeat that until the words lose shape.
If I had fought the staffer, Rafael would have seen it. If he had seen it, he would have broken the glass faster, harder, with everyone watching and every monitor recording proof that he was exactly as dangerous as they feared.
So I left.
And then I cried.
That was what he saw. Not the reason. Not the calculation. Not the part where I tore myself off that glass because I was trying to save whatever chance he still had.
He saw my face fall apart.
He cracked the glass for that.
Now he’s under the gas again, and I’m in a room with a lock I can hear.
The afternoon crawls. I pace. Ten steps to the window, ten steps back. The compound outside is concrete and steel. Guards cross the yard in pairs. A vehicle pulls through the security gate, windows tinted. Another follows.
The rhythm of the building changes around four o’clock.
Footsteps in the corridor move faster. Voices drop lower. A door closes somewhere down the hall…controlled, firm, someone who doesn’t want to be heard slamming it.
I press my ear to my own door. The electronic lock is still engaged, but the wood is thin enough.
“…delegation’s been in with Viktor for hours.”
“Syndicate, apparently. Here about the wolf on the containment level.”
I stop breathing.
