THIRTY-SIX
XEON
Dakota disappears twenty-seven minutes after Maine finally falls asleep.
She doesn’t go far. She’s too tired for far. Too injured for fast. And too stubborn for either of those things to matter as much as they should.
I only notice because I’ve been watching the hallways without looking like I’m watching the hallways.
It’s a useful skill to possess, especially because people reveal a lot more when they believe they’re unobserved.
They breathe differently. Move differently.
Make choices in the small spaces between being witnessed.
Dakota has always lived within those spaces.
She steps out of the medical room with her hair still loose and her bandana hanging uselessly around her neck. The faded hat is clutched in her hands now, crushed in one fist, like she can’t decide whether to put it back on or throw it across the hallway and hate it for even daring to survive.
Kaito is asleep with his back still leaning against the wall.
Not deeply, because none of us sleep deeply anymore.
His hand is still open on the floor next to him, exactly where Dakota’s fingers had rested earlier.
Fletcher stands near the end of the corridor speaking quietly with Valeria Reyes, all controlled temper and narrowed eyes.
Ewan has his headphones looped around his wrist instead of his neck where they normally live, but his gaze tracks Dakota the moment she moves.
He sees me notice, and I watch the moment he decides not to call it out.
Good.
Dakota doesn’t need yet another voice chasing after her.
She needs a place to exist where no one asks her to be reasonable or understandable.
So, when she turns down the side hallway, I wait approximately six seconds before following after her.
Not because she wouldn’t know, because she definitely does. Of course she knows.
By the time I reach the second turn, her voice floats through the darkness ahead. “If you’re planning on telling me to rest, I’m going to start stabbing people in alphabetical order.”
“I’m not,” I promise.
“Good,” she says, then pauses. “You’re X, so you’d have time to run, but still.”
My mouth almost curves as I turn the corner.
She’s standing at the end of the hallway next to a door with old lettering that has been half-scraped from the glass. GREENHOUSE ACCESS. Most of the letters are long gone, leaving just enough to make a promise the building probably can’t keep.
She’s leaning against the wall, head tipped back, and eyes closed like she’s arguing with her own pulse. She’s too pale and still, but she’s still standing.
“Found you,” I say quietly, even though she wasn’t hard to find. She wasn’t exactly sneaking around and I only gave her a six-second head start, but the words seem to carry something a little more now that she’s lowering her guard a little.
Her eyes open and for a second, she just looks at me. Then her mouth tilts, tired and sharp. “Congratulations. Sorry the prize is shitty.”
“Disagree.”
That makes something in her expression shift. Not soft, and not safe, but less alone.
Dakota huffs before shaking her head, then tries the handle to the greenhouse.
Locked.
She looks at it with an instant personal hatred, so I step next to her and examine the keypad. “May I?”
She glances at me with her face bare, which feels like something I should handle with a great deal of caution. Not because she’s fragile, but because she’s spent years making sure no one was allowed to see it.
“Are you about to commit a crime?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Then by all means, carry on,” she says with a flourished gesture toward the keypad that almost makes me smile again.
The keypad is older than most of the internal locks. Not quite military-grade. Repurposed before the compound became whatever it is now. I remove the casing with the edge of my knife and cross two wires until the lock gives a pathetic, tired little click.
Dakota stares at the door, and then at me. “That was alarmingly attractive.”
“Was it?”
“No. Shut up.”
I open the door. The greenhouse beyond it isn’t actually a greenhouse anymore.
Most of the glass ceiling has been reinforced with plastic panels and mesh.
Vines have overgrown one entire wall, their leaves pale from weak winter light and artificial lamps.
Rows of planter beds sit under humming bulbs.
Some hold herbs, and some hold nothing but soil and stubbornness.
It smells alive in here. Like damp earth, tender leaves, and filtered water. It’s like a quiet refusal to let the world become only metal, blood, and concrete.
Dakota steps inside like she distrusts plants on principle alone. The door closes behind us and the compound noise dulls immediately. There’s no medical monitors beeping. No Hale barking orders and commands. None of Mercer’s guilt. No Maine breathing through pain in the room just down the hall.
There’s just water dripping somewhere and the low hum of grow lights above us.
Dakota stands between two planter beds, shoulders rigid and hair falling around her face like pale moonlight. Her scent is broken now, wild honey and rain tangled tightly with grief, anger, exhaustion, and the weighted chemical edge of old blockers burning away in her system.
It hits the Alpha in me hard enough to make my hands curl, but I force them to relax.
She notices.
“You can leave,” she says.
“I know.”
Her eyes cut to me. “That wasn’t me being polite.”
“I know that, too.”
“Then why are you still here?” she asks.
“Because you haven’t told me to leave,” I tell her softly.
Her expression stutters then. She goes from annoyance to something smaller and much more dangerous.
“You always do that,” she mutters.
“What?”
“Make things sound simple when they’re not.”
I lean back against the locked door. I’m not blocking it, though. If she wants to leave, I’ll step aside and let her before she even reaches me. “They can be complicated and still have a simple answer.”
Dakota laughs once, but it’s not a pretty sound. Good. Ugly is far more honest.
“My brother is alive,” she says.
“He is.”
“He came back.”
“Yes.”
“Except he didn’t come back.”
I hold her gaze as I say, “No.”
The word drops between us heavily and she waits for more. I give her nothing more than that, and her jaw tightens. “That’s it?”
“That’s just what you said,” I tell her gently.
“You’re not going to try to explain to me how he tried? How he had his reasons? How the world was complicated? How he was only trying to save me?” she pushes.
I shake my head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you already know those things,” I explain, keeping my voice even and calm and soft.
Her eyes sharpen. “And?”
“And they don’t make it hurt any less.”
Silence spreads through the greenhouse. A drop of water falls from a leaf into the soil below, and Dakota’s hand tightens around the hat still tightly gripped between her fingers.
“I wanted to hit him again,” she confesses.
“I know.”
“I wanted to crawl right into his chest and never leave.”
“I know.”
“I wanted him to say something that made all the years and pain and suffering worth it,” she rasps, her voice breaking on the word worth, but only for a split second. She hates it immediately, and I see that hatred move through her face quicker than shame can even catch it.
“There are no words like that,” I tell her.
“No,” she says, swallowing harshly. “No, there fucking aren’t.”
She turns away from me then, setting the hat on the edge of the planter bed like she can’t stand holding it anymore but can’t bear placing it any farther. Then she presses both of her hands to the edge of the wood, dirt crumbling under her fingers.
Then, with a small, quiet confession, she says, “I hate him.”
“Yes.”
“I love him.”
“Yes.”
“I hate that I love him.”
I nod.
She looks back at me with bright and furious eyes. “Are you just going to agree with everything?”
“No.”
She raises a challenging eyebrow. “Then disagree with something.”
I accept the challenge and tell her, “You’re not weak because a part of you still needs him.”
“Fuck you,” she says, but it’s not soft or teasing. It’s a sharp blade thrown because she needs to see whether or not I’ll bleed and blame her for it.
I don’t move. “No.”
Her breath catches and the greenhouse suddenly feels smaller than it did before. Her scent shifts, but not with heat. At least, not exactly. It’s want entwined with grief. Anger threaded through need. It’s a whole storm trying to decide if lightning is needed or not.
Dakota’s eyes fall to my mouth, and then they snap away just as quickly before she says, “You don’t get to look at me like that.”
“How am I looking at you?” I ask carefully.
“Like I’m not completely disgusting right now,” she answers with a self-deprecating roll of her eyes.
I push away from the door slowly, and her body grows still. She doesn’t step back, though.
“Dakota.”
She flinches at the sound of her name, but not because she seems to dislike it coming from me. But because tonight, names have a bite to them.
I stop only two paces away from her before I say, “You’re angry. You’re grieving. You’re exhausted and bleeding through things no one should have had any right to ask you to survive.”
Her eyes shine, but there are still no tears. Not here, not yet.
Quieter, I continue, “None of that makes you disgusting.”
“You don’t pity me?” she asks after a single beat.
“No,” I answer honestly.
“Bullshit.”
“I hate what happened to you, but that’s not the same.”
She laughs, harsh and wet. “Why do you say things as if you’ve carved them right out of yourself first?”
I shrug. “Because sometimes I do.”
That makes her stare at me.
And for once, I let her. I let her look. Let her have something other than Maine’s face, Hale’s suspicion, Mercer’s guilt, and every single ghost clawing their way from her past.
“Where are you from?” she asks suddenly.
The question is casual enough that I almost answer the same way. Almost. Instead, I ask, “Originally?”
Dakota raises an eyebrow. “I mean, unless you were grown in a lab or something, yeah. Originally.”