Page 22 of Dose

I don’t want him to step away. I don’t want him to stop touching me.

I add the feeling to my museum. It’s the first thing I’ve found that refuses to fit neatly on a shelf.

10

THEON

While Isla sleeps, my brothers are waiting for me.

I know it before I reach the common level because the corridor carries their silence down to me, and my brothers are never silent. Silence means all eight of them have arranged themselves in the living room with coffee and opinions, and the only agenda item is me.

I consider going back to the lab. I give it the same serious consideration I give all doomed experiments.

Then I walk in.

Eight brothers. Jenna, perched sideways on Nikolai’s lap with her hand resting on the curve of her belly and an expression of pure, feral delight. Every head turns toward me with the coordination of a firing squad.

“There he is.” Darius is sprawled across the long couch with his feet in Damon’s lap, and he sits up like a man who’s been rehearsing. “Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant.”

“I need coffee before this.”

“You need a lawyer before this.” He gestures grandly at the room. “Theon Kovač, you stand accused of extracting one Project Architect specialist from an active burn site, carrying her out bridal-style⁠—”

“Fireman’s carry.”

“Marcus says bridal.”

“Bridal,” Marcus confirms from the corner, where he’s folded into an armchair with his eyes half-closed. “Her head was against his shoulder. He adjusted his stride so it wouldn’t bounce. I heard his gait change from the perimeter.”

“You were three hundred meters away.”

“And your gait changed at three hundred meters.” He opens one eye. “That’s the interesting part.”

I cross to the kitchen counter, where Raphael has left the good coffee out, which means even he knew this was coming and decided I’d need fortification. I pour. I take my time. The room waits with the patience of people who have nowhere else to be and a brother to interrogate.

“Thirteen.” Ezra doesn’t look up from his tablet. “Thirteen prior encounters with active Project Architect personnel. Thirteen eliminations. Zero hesitations. Average decision-to-execution interval, four point two seconds.” He turns the screen toward the room like an exhibit. “Fourteenth encounter: subject sedated with your extraction compound, transported eleven hours, and installed in your private quarters, where she is currently sleeping on your cot with her bootlaces tucked in.”

“You checked her laces?”

“I checked the surveillance feed. You tucked in her laces, Theon.” He says it the way another man would say you buried a body in the garden. “The probability of that sequence occurring by chance is functionally zero.”

“So we’re taking prisoners now.” Damon’s arms are crossed, and there’s nothing playful in it. “Because I’d like that logged somewhere. New protocol. Do we all get one, or is this a chemist-exclusive benefit?”

“She’s not a prisoner.”

“She’s in a sealed sublevel of a covert facility with no knowledge of her location.” His eyes don’t blink. “Walk me through the part where that’s not a prisoner.”

“The door locks from the inside.”

“Oh, well.” Darius flops back against the cushions. “The door locks from the inside. Case dismissed. That’s what I tell all my kidnapping victims.”

“You don’t have kidnapping victims.”

“I could. Apparently we do that now.”

Jenna laughs, bright and wicked, and shifts against Nikolai to get a better view of my face. She’s the only person in this room who’s ever been on the other side of one of our cages, and she’s enjoying this more than anyone.

“Look at his jaw,” she says. “Right there. He does the thing where it goes tight when you’re close to something true. Nik does it too. You all do it. It’s like someone installed the same alarm in nine different men.”