And I'm here. Safe, alive, held together by two men who moved through walls to reach me.
The last thing I see before the infirmary doors close is Gage in the corridor, standing where he stopped Casey, staring after the gurney with an expression I can't read and don't have the words for.
His mouth moves. I can't hear him over the noise, but I can make it out:
I've got you.
The same words Jude said, in a different voice, carrying the same weight.
Chapter 22
Jude
The sedation hits in stages.
Not all at once—they're smarter than that now, or maybe just more afraid. The first injection goes into my shoulder while four guards pin me to the floor even though I have already surrendered, and the second follows ninety seconds later when the first one doesn't slow my breathing enough for their comfort. The third comes through an IV they thread into my arm after the restraints are locked, a steady drip that turns the ceiling liquid and far away.
I let it happen.
Not because I can't fight—I went through six guards and a reinforced steel door to get to that corridor, and the men holding me down know what I'm capable of because half their shift is in the infirmary finding out. I let it happen because fighting now costs me something I can't afford to lose.
I saw her. She was against the wall, conscious, alive, and Gage had Casey pinned to the floor. The objective was met. Everything after that is overhead.
The restraints are standard—four-point, leather and steel, ankles and wrists locked to the rails of the transport bed. They wheel me through corridors I've memorized and into the solitary wing, fluorescent lights passing overhead in steady intervals.
I count them. Fourteen lights between intake and solitary.
The cell door closes. The locks engage—three of them, because someone's updated my security classification in the last hour. The observation slot is open, a rectangle of corridor light cutting across the floor.
They leave the IV in. And for the next six hours, the drip keeps me pinned to the surface of consciousness without letting me break through to full awareness. I exist in the space between sleep and waking, where thoughts form but won't hold, where time moves in lurches—a minute, then an hour, then thirty seconds—and the only constant is the restraint pressure on my wrists and ankles.
But the sedation can't reach everything.
Under the fog and the measured silence of my body doing nothing while the chemicals hold me flat—Casey's hands on her, playing on a loop. The fraction of a second between him lunging and Gage coming through that door, the universe balanced on an edge I can't think past without my chest compressing so hard the monitor beside the bed starts beeping faster.
A nurse checks the IV. Adjusts something. The beeping slows.
Casey's hands on her.
I've killed eighteen men. Dismantled them with patience and precision, read their fear, and felt nothing that qualified as emotion while I worked. Every one of them deserved what came.
This is different.
This isn't how I hunt. This is my skin on fire under the restraints, my jaw locked so tight the tendons ache, my mind replaying half a second of footage because it can't stop, won't stop, because somewhere in the building Casey Robin is breathing and Hope's head hit concrete and I wasn't there fast enough.
Gage was there first.
He came through the stairwell door without hesitation, put Casey on the ground, kept his body between the threat and her. Did exactly what I would have done, except he did it within the rules, without destroying everything Kent built to get me out.
He was enough.
The terror doesn't care. The terror says enough isn't a word that applies when someone you—when she was almost—
The monitor beeps faster. The nurse comes back. More fog, more distance, and the loop keeps playing.
There's a thing I've never told Kent. Never told anyone, because putting it into words would mean admitting what I am, and I've spent three decades learning that some things are better left undescribed.
People want a switch. They need one—the doctors, the courts, the guards, even Kent in his more optimistic moments. They want to believe there's a toggle: monster on one side, man on the other. That the medication suppresses one and reveals the other, that therapy can rewire the circuit, that somewhere inside me is a version that's only the parts they find acceptable.
