Chapter 12 #2
Not mine.
This isn’t mine.
I bolt out the door to find the compound is lit up. Wolves on porches — sitting, standing, some doubled over. Cameron is on the steps with his arms around his knees, rocking. Dane is braced against the barn wall with both hands, his head hanging between his shoulders.
“What’s going on?” I ask as Willow dashes past me toward the healers’ rooms.
“Mia.” She’s breathless. “It’s Mia.” She’s gone before I can ask for details.
Shit.
I jog toward the children’s room. The images get sharper the closer I get. The latex gloves have powder on them; I can smell it, chalky and chemical. The needle withdraws. A cotton ball presses down. A voice says, “Sample four-seven-two. Mark it and move on.”
Sable is inside, standing at the foot of the cot, one hand braced on the rail. She looks up when I appear in the doorway.
“Give us space.” Brisk, efficient, despite the stiff set of her shoulders.
I back off, watching, feeling like an intruder.
Conner is on the cot with Mia in his arms. Her face is pressed into his neck, her body rigid as a board. Her fists are knotted in his shirt. He’s got both arms around her, curved over her like a shell, his mouth near her ear.
“I’ve got you, baby. You’re here. You’re with me. Feel my hands? That’s me. It’s Conner. You’re in your bed, and nothing is going to touch you.”
His voice is steady. His eyes aren’t. He’s looking at Willow, and his eyes are the eyes of a man who carried this child out of the place she’s showing them and thought he’d saved her. Now he’s learning that the place came with her. Inside her. At night, it gets out.
Willow is on the bed beside him, tears running onto her jaw.
“Can you reach her?” he asks her. “With your threads… can you get to her?”
“I’m trying,” Willow chokes out. “The thread sense is wide open, but it’s only working one way.
Fuck!” She covers her face with her hands.
“I can’t… I can’t…” She’s not just getting the images.
She’s getting what’s underneath them… pure terror.
I know, because I can sense it myself. But Willow is connected to every wolf in her pack. This has to be shredding her.
Another wave. The table, different angle — looking up at the fluorescent tubes and the face leaning over.
A man in a surgical mask, only his eyes visible.
His gloved hand adjusts something out of sight, and a new pain starts, deep and sharp, in the crook of a tiny elbow.
The voice: “Hold the arm. She’s moving too much. ”
I gag and turn away. Brenna has come up beside me.
“What’s happening to her?” I swallow bile down. “What is this?”
“It’s been going on since a couple of days after she got here.” Her voice is low. “It started the night after you left. Small at first, the wolves in the nearest cabins said they were having bad dreams. We thought it was trauma. Everyone processing what happened at the facility.”
“It’s not their trauma.”
“No.” She swallows. “It’s hers. She’s projecting her memories. We’ve figured that her magic is telepathy. The stress of the facility and the rescue must have triggered it. She’s never learned to control it. I’ve been working with her, but she’s too little to understand.”
“Make it stop,” Willow sobs as another wave hits. I feel it too. Everyone does.
Conner’s arms tighten. Mia makes a sound against his neck — high, thin, not a word. The sound of an animal in a trap.
“Brenna.” Conner doesn’t look up. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know.” Brenna’s honesty is blunt and terrible. “I’ve never seen a telepath this young. She’s three. She doesn’t even know what she’s doing.”
“Then we ride it out. We stay with her. We ride it out.” He’s stroking her hair, which is clinging damply to her forehead. “Wake up, baby. Wake up.”
I’m standing in the doorway watching a man hold a child through the memories of what was done to her in a facility that men like him delivered her to.
His code on the intake forms. Sample four-seven-two on the needle.
And Conner — who drove the families to the junction, and then went home to dinner — is on a cot absorbing his share of the bill.
He shouldn’t be the only one.
I open the part of my mind I’ve been holding shut and shove everything at him.
The fluorescent tube. The eyes above the mask.
The voice saying sample four-seven-two. The sound Mia made against Conner’s neck.
The straps on wrists too small for the buckles.
I push the feeling of it — the rage, the grief, the terror.
When the next wave hits, I let that through to him, too.
This is yours, you bastard. Your people took her there. Feel it.
There’s a long period where nothing happens. Then what comes back isn’t what I expect.
No wall. No reframe. No alpha tucking it into a box he can manage.
A flinch. Deep. The unprotected response of a man hit somewhere he didn’t know he was soft. And then — this is what makes my hands shake on the doorframe — he stays open. He doesn’t retreat. He sits in it. The way Conner is sitting in it, with Mia’s nightmare pouring through him.
It’s not what I want. I want him to give me a fresh reason to hate him.
Don’t. Don’t you dare take this like it matters to you. Don’t you dare feel this and make me watch you feeling it.
Mia’s broadcast fades.
The images lose their edges. Blur. Go dark. Her body softens against Conner’s chest. The fists in his shirt ease open. Her breathing changes — rough to smooth, shallow to deep. Sleep. Real sleep, not the nightmare kind.
The room is quiet.
Conner pulls a blanket up over Mia, tucking it around her without disturbing her sleep.
“Same time tomorrow night, I expect,” Sable says. “Until Brenna can teach her to close the door.”
“We’ll be here,” Conner says. His voice is hoarse.
His hand is on the back of Mia’s skull, his fingers spread through her hair, and the hold isn’t a rescuer’s hold anymore.
It’s the grip of a man who’s understood that saving her from the building was the easy part.
Saving her from what the building left in her is where things get hard.
Willow leans into him. Her hand on his knee. She’s stopped crying, but her face is a mess.
I push off the doorframe and walk back through the compound.
Cameron is still on the steps, arms around his knees. Dane has stepped away from the barn wall but hasn’t moved far. Nobody is talking.
I return to my cabin and shut the door. I mix the herbs again and drink them. I don’t need it right now, but the bitterness cuts the chalk-and-antiseptic taste Mia’s broadcast left in my mouth.
I lie on the cot. I stare at the ceiling.
He’s still there. Still sitting in whatever the images did to him. Not pushing it away.
I wanted him to feel it. He felt it.
What came back was not what I wanted. What came back was a man who absorbed it and owned it, and I don’t know what to do with that. Because the version of Garrett Forrester who lets a child’s pain in without shielding doesn’t fit inside the version I built the rabbit around.
The heat simmers but doesn’t overwhelm me.
It’s really not the time.