12. Theon
THEON
The shower runs cold because I need it to.
Isla Summer has been sleeping four meters from my bed for six days, and years of discipline have become irrelevant.
I know exactly what desire does to the body.
That knowledge has not helped me control my response to the way she smells when she leans over the mass spectrometer, the small sound she makes when a synthesis behaves, or the sight of her in one of my shirts because the jumpsuit she arrived in is being washed and I haven’t sourced replacements as quickly as I could have.
I refuse to examine that last point.
I brace one hand against the tile and take my cock in the other, jaw tight, cold water striking the back of my neck.
It doesn’t take long. It never does anymore, which is humiliating in its own right.
Isla at the bench, her ponytail sliding loose.
Isla’s pulse jumping beneath my fingers when I hold her wrist too long.
Isla looking at me as though she knows exactly what I am trying not to feel.
I finish with my forehead against the tile and her name caught behind my teeth.
“You’re compromised, Kova?,” I tell the wall.
The wall offers no argument.
When I come out, dressed, my hair dripping onto my collar, she is already at the bench with tea she made herself. She has memorized where everything lives. Of course she has.
She looks up. “Someone is coming today.”
“How do you know?”
“You reorganized the glassware twice last night.” She takes a sip. “Also, someone has been outside the door for ninety seconds without knocking.”
The door opens without a knock. Marcus normally knocks. Today, he doesn’t.
He fills the doorway, all restless muscle and focused attention. His pupils are uneven, which means he has been pushing his hearing. His eyes fix on Isla. He inhales.
“Cortisol elevated. Heart rate seventy-one. Respiration steady.” He tilts his head, listening. My hands curl at my sides. “She showered with your soap.”
“There’s one soap,” Isla says. “The alternative was solvent.”
“She isn’t lying about the soap.” Marcus starts to circle her.
I step between them before he completes the arc.
His mouth twitches. “Easy, brother. I’m reading, not touching.”
“Stay by the door.”
“Her heart rate hit eighty-two when I entered. Then she checked the exits and your position. It returned to seventy-one once she confirmed you were between us.”
“I’m aware I’m being evaluated,” Isla says. “I’d rather you do it thoroughly. Incomplete threat assessments get people killed.”
Marcus gives a short, genuine laugh. “Her pulse didn’t move when she said killed.”
Isla shrugs. “The word stopped meaning much around age nine.”
Nobody asks why. In this building, nine is young enough to be an answer.
Ezra arrives eleven minutes later with a tablet. He barely looks at Isla before fitting her into whatever model he has been refining since I carried her out of Ashford.
“Isla Summer,” he says. “On day four of the audit, you flagged lot seventeen of the D-40 as your reference standard. Why that lot?”
“Most uniform excipient concentration. Maximum deviation of point-three percent across the sampled units.”
“The batch certificate says point-four.”
“The certificate is wrong. Korte’s previous auditor used the balance in bay two after the June power fault.
Its calibration drifts with humidity. I reran the samples on the bay one balance and got point-three.
” She sets down her tea. “Check the maintenance dates against the humidity records. They explain the discrepancy.”
Ezra’s thumb moves across the screen, then stops. One eyebrow shifts. From him, it is practically applause.
“Kessler’s file says she recruited you at six,” he says. “But your synthesis style contains self-taught elements. Improvised heat management. Program training discourages improvisation.”
“Program chemists who don’t improvise die when equipment fails and handlers refuse to replace it.” Her voice remains level. “Improvising kept the work running. Naming the equipment kept me sane. Both helped me survive.”
“The probability that Project Architect engineered her capture to place her here was eleven percent when you brought her home,” Ezra says to me, as though she isn’t standing beside us.
“And now?”
“Recalculating.” He returns to his tablet. I want that to mean lower. Ezra knows it and gives me nothing.
The door opens again. Dominic enters without a word, so unobtrusively that Isla acknowledges him before I do. He stops near the fume hood and watches her, searching for the delay between reaction and expression that would suggest a performance.
She studies him in return.
“You’re waiting for the mask to slip,” he says eventually. “I don’t think it will.” His steel-blue eyes move to me. “If she is performing, she didn’t build the role for us. The restraint is conditioned. I’ve seen no sign that her answers are rehearsed.”
Some of the tension leaves my chest. It returns the moment I hear Darius in the corridor.
He enters with his sleeves shoved to his elbows and his ink exposed, ash-blond hair deliberately untidy. His gaze takes in the room, pauses on the distance between Isla and me, and brightens.
“So this is the specialist.” He crosses the lab and takes Isla’s hand before I can intercept. He lifts it, turns it, examines her fingers with theatrical appreciation. She lets him, her expression cool. “Chemist’s hands. Steady. I’ve heard remarkable things.”
“You’ve heard nothing. I doubt Theon talks about me.”
“He doesn’t have to. He’s reorganized his glassware, he’s standing like a guard dog, and he has been staring at my hand on yours for four seconds.” Darius does not let go. He draws her half a step closer and lowers his voice. “If you tire of the sublevel, my end of the building has actual windows.”
My hand closes around his wrist.
I don’t decide to move. I am simply holding him, grip tight enough to feel his pulse. The room goes still.
“Let go of her.”
His grin widens. “Fascinating.”
“Darius.”
“He came in intending to test you,” Isla says gently. “It’s working.”
Darius releases her and steps back, palms raised. “I like her. She reads the room almost as quickly as I do.” He points at me. “And you are in serious trouble, brother. I have never seen you do that. Not once.”
“Get out of my lab.”
His eyebrow lifts. “I’m staying for the verdict. I wouldn’t miss this for a coup.”
Raphael is the last of the assigned assessors to arrive. He comes down dressed in black, silver studs catching the laboratory light, and stops an arm’s length from Isla.
He carries no tablet and asks Marcus for no numbers. He simply studies her. I watch Isla resist the urge to retreat as his attention moves over the tension in her shoulders and the careful placement of her feet.
“Someone trained that reflex into you young,” he says at last.
“Six.”
“Consequence conditioning?”
Her jaw tightens. “Yes.”
“You still protect your left side when a right hand enters your space. You did it when Darius reached for you.” Raphael holds her gaze. There is no cruelty in his expression, only recognition. “That reflex is real.”
He turns to me. “The trauma response is real. So is the conditioning. She’s one of us.” His voice lowers. “She just never got a Nikolai.”
I believe him. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed someone else to say it.
Nikolai steps into the lab a moment later, arms crossed. His pale gaze passes over Isla, then rests on me.
“Limited access,” he says. “Unescorted movement on this sublevel only. Common areas with you during monitored hours. No communications, no exit routes, and no access beyond those areas.” He holds my eyes.
“She’s your responsibility, Theon. Her mistakes are your mistakes. Her betrayals are yours to answer for.”
I nod. “Understood.”
“I doubt you do.” For a moment, he looks tired. “But you will.”
He leaves. The others follow one at a time—Marcus with a final, knowing look; Ezra already adjusting his model; Dominic as quietly as he arrived. Raphael gives Isla a small nod before going. Darius leaves last, pausing in the doorway to blow her a kiss solely to watch my jaw tighten.
Then it is just the two of us and the hum of the equipment.
Isla exhales. “I passed.”
“You passed.”
She looks at my fingers, still curled toward my palms, then at my face. The corner of her mouth lifts.
“You grabbed his wrist.”
“I’m aware.”
“You didn’t think through it first.” She turns back to the bench and reaches for the flask. Her voice softens. “I’ve decided to find that interesting.”
I stand there with my pulse misbehaving and understand with clinical certainty that tonight’s shower will be very cold and entirely useless.