Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
Cal's lab is in the admin building, which means crossing the compound, which means the cold, which means Leo complaining about the cold for the entire outdoor walk in a way that is somehow both irritating and companionable.
"I don't see why I have to be here," he says.
"Cal wants to restart the coursework. The reclassification knocked the schedule."
"The coursework was already an insult to my intelligence."
"And yet you failed the last module."
He opens the lab door for me with an exaggerated flourish. "I was distracted."
Jake and Jim are already inside. Jake is at the counter furthest from the door, arms crossed, looking at the behavioral survey in front of him like it tried to bite him.
Jim is beside him, already halfway through his own, pen moving steadily.
They look up when we come in — Jake with his usual economy of expression, Jim with the quality of attention I'm still getting used to.
He doesn't just look at people. He reads them.
He reads me for a moment. I look away first.
Cal comes in from the back room with a stack of folders. He sets them down and looks at the four of us arranged around his lab and something in his face does a quiet, careful thing.
"Good," he says. Like our presence confirmed something.
***
Cal reviews Jake and Jim's behavioral surveys — standard new arrival protocol, the kind that establishes baselines for everything that comes after.
He hands them cognitive surveys and Jake picks up his pen and puts it down and picks it up again.
Jim reads through the first page, flips to the second, and starts writing without fanfare.
Cal pulls Leo's coursework folder and a new one for me.
"We're starting fresh," he says. "The reclassification changed your baseline completely. Everything I had before is comparison data now, not a starting point."
"Lucky me," I say.
"Lucky us," he says. No irony. He means it.
Leo opens his folder, scans the first page, and immediately has opinions.
He expresses them. Cal listens without reacting and explains the same thing he already explained in slightly different words.
Leo finds new objections. This is apparently how their coursework always goes and I find it oddly comforting.
I work through my module. The material is different now — Cal has adjusted it. The questions are more specific. Some of them I can't answer because I don't have the framework yet, and I write don't know yet in the margins and Cal, passing behind me, sees it and nods.
"That's the right answer," he says quietly.
Across the lab, Jim has finished his survey. He sets the pen down and sits back and his eyes find me.
I focus on my coursework.
Jim's pull has been getting steadily less ignorable. It's not loud the way Jake's was loud. It doesn't insist. It just accumulates, the way water accumulates, until you notice how much of it there is. In a room this size, with him ten feet away and staring, it is a presence.
I turn a page I haven't finished reading.
Jake puts his pen down at the forty-minute mark. "Done."
Cal looks up. "Both sections?"
"Yes."
"The reflection portion at the end?"
A pause. "Most of it."
Cal crosses the room and picks up the survey without comment. He reads through it — Jake watching him with the expression of someone waiting for a verdict they've already decided not to care about — and then sets it back down.
"Good," Cal says. "Honest answers are more useful than complete ones."
Cal moves to Jim's survey. Reads it more slowly. His expression stays even but his pen comes out and he makes a note in the margin of his own copy, something small. He hands Jim's survey back without comment and Jim takes it and glances at what Cal wrote.
Jim looks at me.
I look at my coursework.
***
Something shifts in the room.
Not sound — a change in quality, the way air pressure changes before weather. I go still mid-sentence. My pen stops.
Jake looks up from across the lab. He read it in me the same moment I felt it — the ability to register when something is building before it breaks. His jaw tightens slightly and then releases and he looks back at the table.
Jim has looked up too. He's watching me with the not-looking-away quality, reading whatever is on my face.
Cal is at the back counter. He doesn't look up. But his pen, I notice, has stopped moving.
Nobody says anything.
The pull between me and RJ is louder than it was this morning. Still not the bond — never quite the bond, always this other thing, the pull my alpha nature tracks without my permission. But louder. Like something in him is closer to the surface.
I breathe. Pick up my pen. Write the next answer.
The lab continues.
Dalton appears at the door twenty minutes later.
He checks in with Cal the way he checks in with everyone — brief, professional.
They exchange something about assessment timelines.
Cal answers without looking up from what he's writing.
Dalton's eyes move across the room — Jake, Jim, Leo, me — the sweep of a man keeping track of variables.
He nods once and leaves.
Jim watches him go. Not the brief flicker I've seen before — this is longer. More deliberate. Jim's gaze stays on the door for a moment after Dalton has cleared it, something working behind his eyes that I can't read all the way to the bottom of.
Then he turns back to Cal.
"The security consultant," he says. "How long has he been here?"
Cal looks up. "Since just after Ms. Jones's panel review. Why?"
Jim is quiet. "No reason," he says. And goes back to the reflection portion of his survey.
Cal looks at me briefly. I look back. We don't say anything. Cal's pen starts moving again and I close my folder and Leo makes one final objection about the coursework that Cal doesn't acknowledge and the session ends.
The walk back takes me past the common room.
I feel him before I see him. The pull sharpens as I get closer to the door — louder, more insistent, my alpha nature locking onto him the way it always does, the wanting running hot before I've made any decision about it. I slow down. Stop at the doorway.
RJ is at the far wall. Cuffed. Hands behind him, the chain fixed to the anchor point at waist height, standing because there's no way to sit. His head comes up when I appear in the doorway.
We look at each other across the room.
Behind me in the corridor a radio crackles — a voice, then another, something about the yard. Running feet. The staff member who was stationed outside the common room moves past me at a jog, already talking into his radio. Fight. Need backup outside.
The corridor empties.
I step inside.
***
He doesn't look away as I approach. His eyes track me the way they always track me — like I'm the only fixed point in whatever space he's in — and the pull between us runs louder with every step. By the time I'm three feet away it's a sound I can feel in my back teeth.
I stop in front of him.
Up close he fills the space differently than he does at a fence.
There's no chain link between us. I can see the line of his jaw, the tension held in his throat, the way his chest rises and falls.
His long hair falls into his face. His shoulders are forced back by the cuffs and his hands are behind him and every line of him is straining toward me.
"Hey," I say.
His chest moves. Once.
"Alex." His voice is low and rough and my name in his mouth is everything I need right now.
I look at his wrists. The cuffs. The chain at waist height behind him. I look at his face.
"Does it hurt?" I say. "The cuffs."
He shakes his head. Small. Minimal. He's conserving everything.
The common room is empty. The afternoon light comes through the far window at an angle, hitting the floor, making the institutional space look almost like somewhere a person could live.
He's right here. The distance he keeps — not walls the way Gray had walls, something quieter than that, careful managed space — is gone. He's looking at me like he's been waiting to look at me like this since the first time I came to the fence and sat down on the cold ground.
"Mate," he says.
One word. Low. From somewhere underneath language.
The pull between us blazes.
"Mine," he says. And then, rougher: "Need."
I take a step toward him.
RJ's breathing has changed. He's watching me with a burning steady gaze and I can feel through what runs between us exactly how much it's costing him. The chain at his wrists. The wall behind him. Everything in him straining toward me and nowhere to go.
I close the distance and press my hand flat against his chest and feel his heart slamming under my palm.
"I know," I say. "I know."
He makes a sound. Low. Rough. Nothing like a word.
I reach up and pull his face down to mine and kiss him.
He can't hold me. His hands are behind him and the chain won't give and he can't reach and I can feel the frustration of it in the sound he makes against my mouth — not anger, something more desperate, the anguish of a man who wants and can't. His mouth moves against mine and it's hungry and careful at the same time, wanting everything and terrified of taking too much.
I pull back. Look at him.
"I need you," I say.
His jaw works.
I hold his gaze and drop to my knees.
***
His breath catches.
I reach for him — careful, deliberate, looking up at his face the whole time — and he watches me with those burning eyes and doesn't look away. Can't. Won't.
He is already so hard. Leaking from just our kiss.
I pull the drawstring and then his length is in my hand — and I press my mouth to him and he groans, low, rough, from somewhere he doesn't usually let anything out of.
His hips shift barely and I take my time because this is the only thing I can give him right now. This. Present. Here.
His taste is everything to me. I am aware of his every movement and sound.
I wish I could feel his large hands cradling my face, stroking my jaw as I bring him pleasure — but I feel him through what runs between us instead.
Yearning and need and the specific satisfaction that I am close, that I am here, that he is not alone in this.
He says my name once, broken, when he comes.
Just that.
I stand up.
He's still against the wall, chest heaving, the burning in his eyes changed now — still there, still him, but something in it has softened.
I step close and press my face into his chest.
He can't hold me. His hands are behind him and there's nothing he can do and I can feel him straining against the chain. His face turns toward my hair. He breathes.
We stay like that. His face in my hair and my arms around him and the pull between us running warm and quiet and present. I breathe him in. The wanting that has been running loud since the lab, since the fence, since the first time I saw him — it's quiet now.
Then I hear the footsteps. Coming back down the corridor. Radios crackling. Staff returning.
I pull back.
His eyes track me.
He won't want to see them handle me. I know this without being told. He's still cuffed to a wall and if staff redirect me away from him while he's watching and can't do anything about it, the thing that just softened will not stay soft.
"I'm going," I say.
He nods. Once. The barest movement.
"I'll come back to the fence," I say.
Something eases in his face. The smallest thing. Enough.
I go.
The corridor is full of staff coming back from the yard. Dalton is among them and his eyes find mine immediately — reading, assessing. I walk past all of them and don't look back and feel RJ's gaze on me through the wall for the length of the corridor.