“We need to run more assessments. Determine whether you can be stabilized long-term. Whether the episodes are controllable or whether the conditioning is too deeply embedded.” His voice is even. Reasonable. Which makes it worse. “This is for your own good. You wouldn’t want to lose your grip and hurt someone.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. The glass. The staffer. The monitoring equipment. Every time the wolf took over, I lost the ability to choose what happened next. Someone could have died. Sable could have been hurt.
Never. I would never!
“I’ll do whatever it takes,” I say. “Whatever tests you need. I’ll cooperate. I can prove that I’m safe around people.”
Viktor watches me for a long moment. Then he nods. Once. Not agreement…acknowledgment.
“There is a specialist,” he says. “Someone with insights into the kind of work that was done to you. They may be able to help us understand the frequency mechanisms and determine a path forward.”
For one dangerous second, hope gets past the restraints.
A specialist. Someone Sable found, maybe. Someone who knows the words for what was done to me and won’t turn those words into another cage.
“Okay,” I say. “When?”
“She’s here now.”
The containment door opens behind Viktor.
Flowers over chemicals.
No.
The sound of her shoes reaches me first.
Leather soles on hard flooring. A measured step that never hurries. The same step I heard every morning before the pain started.
She enters the observation room.
Pale hair. Pale suit. Pale eyes. Hands clasped behind her back.
My body goes before my mind catches up. My back arches off the cot, the cuffs biting into my wrists as every muscle fires at once. Pulling. Straining. The chest strap cuts into my breastbone. The shift I’ve been holding back tears through my shoulders, my spine, my hands, and my claws rip into the cot padding.
Not her.
Please not her.
A sound tears out of me, raw enough to hurt my throat. It fills the cell before I can stop it: panic with teeth, terror given shape, the noise of a body trying to escape when the straps are holding, and the walls are too close.
She is on the other side of the glass.
Right there.
Watching me with that tilt of her head.
“Get her out.” The words barely form. My jaw is wrong. Too heavy. “Get…her—”
“The subject is reacting to a familiar stimulus.” Her voice. Gentle. To Viktor. Not to me. Never to me, not when others are watching. Always about me. “This is not aggression. It will pass.”
“Get her OUT!”
The panel shudders.
I don’t mean to do it. I don’t even know what part of me has moved. One second her voice is in the room, soft and certain and poisonous, and the next the observation glass is groaning in its frame, the old cracks spreading like ice under pressure.
The monitors spike. The medic stumbles back from her station.
