Chapter 4
Chapter four
Dinner was a tray slid through a slot in my door. Protein bar, apple, water. Another bowl, this time with something that might have been chili. I ate all of it because I learned a long time ago that you eat what's in front of you.
The bolt turns. Sven fills the doorway.
"Common room. Evening programming."
"What's evening programming?"
"Supervised communal time."
"You could just say hanging out."
"I could. I won't. Hands where I can see them. Walk."
I walk.
The hallway is quieter at this hour. The fluorescent buzz feels louder without the background noise of doors opening and voices carrying. My boots squeak on the floor. Sven's don't.
We pass through a set of double doors — different ones than the cafeteria route — and into a large room.
Couches. Old, arranged in a loose semicircle. An air hockey table in the corner. A TV mounted to the wall, off. No lamps. No sharp edges. Nothing heavier than a cushion. I clocked that in two seconds. Old habit. Every room is an inventory of what can be thrown, or swung.
There are maybe ten guys in here. Red, all of them. Some on the couches. One leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed, staring at nothing. Two standing near the air hockey table.
Leo is on the far couch. He sees me and his mouth does that thing — the smirk. He doesn't wave. He lifts his chin. I see you.
I see him too. But my attention is torn.
The guy in the corner was already restrained before I walked in.
I know because his cuffs are different from anything I've seen in this building — thick steel, bolted to the wall at hip height. The kind they use when someone isn't just a flight risk but an event risk. He's the only one chained. Everyone else is loose.
He's standing because the bolt doesn't give him enough slack to sit.
This is RJ. Up close.
The yard didn't prepare me for this. From fifty feet away, through a window, he was a silhouette. Long stride. Broad shoulders.
Up close he's —
I lose the sentence.
He's tall. Taller than he looked from the window, and lean in a way that isn't thin — stripped down, nothing wasted, every line of him deliberate.
Dark hair falling across his face. He doesn't push it back. No tattoos. No piercings. Nothing decorative. Just him. Raw.
He isn't looking at me when I sit down.
Then he is.
His head turns. Not fast — slow, like he's tracking something he caught on the air. His chin comes up. His nostrils flare.
And those eyes. Pale. Too bright. They find me through his hair and they lock on and everything about his body changes.
His shoulders roll forward. His weight shifts toward me. The chain between his cuffs and the bolt pulls taut — a soft metallic sound that shouldn't be loud but somehow is, because the room just went quiet.
The two guys on the couch nearest him stop talking.
One draws his legs up, slow, pressing himself into the cushions.
Across the room, another boy stands from where he was leaning on the wall and takes two steps toward the door.
He doesn't run. He repositions. Like something just changed in the air and his body knew before his brain did.
Sven sees it. His jaw tightens. He takes one step away from the door, toward RJ, and says something low that I can't hear.
RJ doesn't respond. Doesn't blink. Doesn't look at Sven.
He's looking at me the way people look at things they thought they'd lost.
I should be scared. I've been in enough lockups, enough intake halls, enough rooms full of men who are bigger and meaner and less predictable than I am to know when I should be scared. This is that. This is every red flag my body has ever learned to read.
But my body isn't doing what it's supposed to.
The heat starts in my chest. Not panic — something deeper, lower, a slow pour that drops through my stomach and settles between my hips.
My skin flushes when I should be cold with fear.
My breath changes — shallow, quick, but not the way it goes during a panic attack.
A different rhythm. One that has nothing to do with terror and everything to do with the fact that this man is staring at me from across the room and my body has decided that's more important than anything else.
What the fuck is wrong with me.
His eyes drop to my hands. My wrists. Something crosses his face — jaw tight, shoulders pulling forward — and the chain goes taut again. Harder.
He doesn't know me. I've never seen him before in my life. A glimpse through a window doesn't count.
But whatever just happened in his body when he looked at me — I felt it in mine.
My left wrist throbs. Right at the pulse point. I press my thumb into it without thinking and it flares once, hard, then settles into something steady.
The room is still tightening. I can feel it even though I don't understand it. The air has weight. The guys on the couches are shifting — bodies angling toward walls, hands gripping armrests, eyes cutting sideways. Something is happening that everyone in here understands except me.
Torres makes a sound.
Not a word. A whimper. Low, involuntary — the kind of sound you make when pain catches you by surprise. He's standing near the air hockey table and his hands are gripping the edge and his knuckles are white and then his knuckles are wrong.
His hand stretches. The joints swell. His nails thicken, darken, curve, and I am watching a human hand stop being a human hand.
No.
His body convulses. He drops. His back arches and something moves under his shirt and I hear his bones. I hear them. Not breaking. Reorganizing. Wet, dense sounds that shouldn't come from inside a person. His jaw stretches wider than a jaw goes. And then everything speeds up and he's furry.
I should look away. I should scream. I should do anything other than what I'm doing, which is sitting on this couch with my mouth open, completely frozen, watching a boy turn into an animal on the floor of a common room in the middle of nowhere, Alaska.
This isn't real.
And then it's done. And there's a wolf on the floor where Torres was standing.
Not a big dog. Not something that could be mistaken for anything domestic. A wolf — massive, dark-furred, sides heaving, blood on its muzzle where it bit through its own lip during the change. Its eyes are wild.
I can't breathe. My heart is doing something violent and my vision has gone tunnel-narrow and I can't feel my hands.
But underneath the panic — underneath the screaming white noise of that was a person thirty seconds ago — a part of me leaned toward it. Not away. Toward.
I don't understand that. I file it in the place I keep things I'm not ready to look at.
Sven moves. Not panicked. Not rushing. He moves the way someone moves when the smoke alarm goes off and they know where the extinguisher is. Crosses the room in four strides. Grabs the wolf by the scruff and hauls it toward a door at the back of the room.
Another staff member appears. They get the door open. Sven shoves the wolf through. It snarls — full-throated, a sound that vibrates in my rib cage — and then the door closes and the lock turns and it's just a door.
With a wolf behind it.
I stare at the door.
There is no file in my head labeled WHAT TO DO WHEN A PERSON BECOMES A WOLF. I've been in rooms where people were stabbed. I've seen shit that would make a social worker need a social worker. But I have never seen anything that broke the basic rules of what a human body can do.
And nobody else is reacting.
That's the part that undoes me worse than the wolf did.
The other guys — the ones who pressed into couches and repositioned toward walls — are settling back. One exhales long and slow, like he just sat through turbulence on a flight. Another glances at the air hockey table like he's annoyed.
Nobody screamed. Nobody ran. Nobody said what the fuck or oh my God or any of the things you're supposed to say when biology just shredded itself on the floor.
They've seen this before.
It's Tuesday for them.
RJ hasn't looked at the door. Hasn't looked at the wolf. Hasn't looked at the blood on the floor near the air hockey table.
Just me.
Even now — with my brain screaming and my hands shaking and a wolf locked in a room ten feet away — he's still watching me. And the look on his face isn't shock or fear or aggression. It's something worse.
Focus. Like I'm the only clear thing in a world that's been static for a long time.
Sven is back and reaching for my arm to pull me off the couch.
The sound that comes out of RJ is so low I feel it in my molars before I hear it. Not human. Not a sound a human throat makes. A vibration that starts in his chest and pushes through his teeth and it is a warning.
Sven stops.
For exactly one second, the man who has run every room I've seen him in with absolute authority — stops.
The other guys feel it. Heads turn. Bodies go still. Whatever that sound means in whatever language this is, they understood it.
I didn't understand it. But my body did. My pulse spiked. My skin flushed. And something in me answered — not with fear, not with logic, but with a recognition I have no explanation for.
I'm sitting on a couch in a facility I don't understand, and my body's loudest signal isn't fear. It's want. For a man who just made the same sound as the thing behind that locked door.
Sven recovers. Gets his hand on my arm. Pulls me up hard enough that my shoulder wrenches.
"Walk."
I walk. Because if I stay one more second I'll look at him again, and every time I look at him my body does something I can't control.
I look back anyway.
He's leaning into the chain. Still. Cuffs biting his wrists. Hair in his eyes. And through it — that pale, bright stare. Still on me.
Still on me.
Sven pulls me around the corner and he's gone.
The hallway. Fluorescent lights. My boots on the floor. My pulse everywhere.
"What the fuck was that." Not a question. A demand.
Sven keeps walking.
"That kid — Torres — he just — he —" The words won't organize. How do you say he turned into a wolf to someone who was in the room and doesn't seem to think that's remarkable? "Where am I? What is this?"
"Keep walking."
"He turned into a wolf."
Sven doesn't answer. We pass doors and he stops at mine. Opens it.
A voice from down the hall. Casual. Almost amused.
"Figured it out yet, Dorothy?"
Leo. Leaning against the wall outside his own door. Arms crossed. That smirk. But his eyes are serious — watching me the way you watch someone who just got hit by a car and hasn't looked down yet.
"Not Kansas, is it?" he says.
Sven's hand tightens on my arm. "Inside. Now."
I step into my room. Turn around.
The door closes. The bolt turns.
I stand in the middle of the room for a long time.
My hands are shaking. My breath won't steady. A boy turned into a wolf. A man in chains looked at me like I was the answer to a question he'd forgotten how to ask. And my body said yes before my brain could say run.
I sit on the bed. Press my back to the wall.
From somewhere in the building — distant, muffled by doors and concrete and distance — a howl. Low and long.