Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Iwake up burning.
Not the wrist. All of me. My skin is hot to the touch — I press my palm to my forehead and it's like gripping a pipe that's been running hot water.
The sheets are damp with sweat. My hair is plastered to my neck.
The room is freezing — frost on the window, my breath visible in the air — and my body is throwing off heat like it's trying to melt through the mattress.
I kick the covers off. Sit up. Vapor lifts off my arms. Thin wisps, barely visible in the dark, rising off my skin like I'm a road in August.
This isn't a fever. Fevers come with ache and weakness.
This is the opposite. I feel more. Every nerve lit up.
The cotton of my shirt against my stomach is a texture I can count threads in.
The hum of the building's generator, which I've barely noticed for days, is loud enough to trace through the walls.
And the smells — bleach, concrete, the metallic bite of cold air leaking through the window seal, and underneath all of it, something else.
Him.
I can smell RJ. Not the way you smell someone who's in the room.
The way you smell something carried on a current — faint, directional, threading through the building's recycled air like it took a route to reach me.
Pine and sweat and something animal and underneath that, something warm.
Something that my body identifies before my brain has language for it.
Mine.
The thought arrives uninvited and absolute. I shove it away. It comes back.
My left wrist is pulsing. Hard. Each beat synchronized with my heart but running hotter, the heat concentrated at the vein, and when I look down in the dark I can see it — not the gold thread from the fence but something new.
A shadow beneath the skin. A mark along the inside of my wrist, an arc, darker than the surrounding skin.
Like something underneath drew itself onto the surface.
I press my thumb into it. The heat blooms outward.
And I hear him.
Not through the wall. Through the building. Through the concrete and the doors and the hallways between us — pacing. The rhythm of his steps. Back and forth, back and forth, and underneath it a low sound that isn't a growl and isn't a whine. Something in between. Restless. Searching.
He's awake. He's pacing. And I know — the way I know my own pulse — that he's burning too.
I stand up. My legs are steady. The fever should make me weak but it doesn't. It makes me sharper. Faster. The room is too small. The walls are too close. My body wants to move, wants to follow the pull in my wrist down the hallway and through every locked door between me and the source.
The bolt on my door is on the outside. I can't open it.
I grip the handle. It's cold. My hand is so hot that the metal hisses under my palm — moisture evaporating on contact. I pull. The door doesn't move. Steel bolt. Steel frame.
I pull harder.
Something gives. Not the bolt — the frame. The faintest groan of metal shifting in concrete. Not breaking. Flexing. Like the door wants to open and the building is considering letting it.
I shouldn't be able to flex a steel door frame. I weigh a hundred and ten pounds. This is not something my body can do.
I pull again. The groan is louder. A crack appears in the concrete around the upper hinge — hairline, barely visible, but there.
My hands are shaking. Not from effort. From the realization that the effort isn't hard. That my body is doing something it shouldn't be capable of and it feels natural, feels right, feels like I've been operating at half capacity my whole life and the fever just plugged me in.
One more pull. The bolt scrapes. The door shifts in the frame — an inch. Two. Not open. But loose. Loose enough that I can get my fingers into the gap and push and the bolt catches and grinds and —
Open.
I stand in the hallway. Bare feet on cold concrete. Emergency lighting only — dim orange strips along the baseboards, casting long shadows. The hall is empty. No skeleton crew in sight. The checkpoint is somewhere behind me, around the corner, and Leo said the night guy checks every ninety minutes.
The pull in my wrist is a rope now. Not a thread. A rope, thick and insistent, tugging me left down the corridor toward the common room.
I follow it.
The hallway is different at night. Longer.
The doors on either side are closed, bolted, and behind some of them I can hear breathing.
One door has a low moan leaking through it — not pain, not nightmare.
Restless. The building is stirring. Whatever is happening to me, they're feeling echoes of it in their sleep.
I pass Leo's door. My wrist aches – connected. He's behind that door. I can feel him the way I can feel RJ — a point on a map that my body has drawn.
I keep walking.
The common room door is closed but not bolted. The handle turns. I push it open.
Dark. The couches are shadows. The air hockey table is a shape in the corner. No windows in this room — nothing but the faint orange glow from the emergency strip near the floor.
He's here.
Not chained. Not bolted to the wall. Just — here. Standing in the middle of the room in the dark, facing the door. Facing me. Like he knew I was coming.
They must have moved him. New containment protocol after the yard incident — different room, different restraints. Or he got out the same way I did. Pulled a bolt. Flexed a frame. Followed the thing in his blood that said go to her.
The fever spikes. My vision sharpens — the dark isn't dark anymore. I can see him clearly. The lines of his face. The fall of his hair. His eyes already locked on mine, the irises luminous in the dark, reflecting light that isn't there. Animal and alien and devastating.
He's breathing hard. His chest rises and falls under the thin red shirt and his hands are at his sides and his fingers are flexing — the way a person's hands move when they're trying very hard not to reach for something.
The air between us is charged the way air gets before lightning.
I take a step.
He takes one too. Not toward me — sideways. His weight shifts and his head tilts and the movement is so fluid and so inhuman that my breath catches. He's not walking. He's stalking. The way a predator moves when it's found something it wants and is deciding how to approach.
I should be afraid. A man twice my size is circling me in a dark room and I should be afraid.
My body is so far past afraid. My body is heat and pull and want and every step he takes sends another wave of warmth through me and I am watching him move in the dark and all I can think about is what it would feel like to have that body against mine.
The weight of him. The heat of him. Those hands — scarred, shaking, desperate — gripping my hips the way Leo's did except nothing about RJ would be careful and I don't want careful. I want him close. Skin on skin.
"Alex."
I stop breathing.
His voice. I've never heard his voice. In the common room he growled.
At the fence he made sounds. But this — this is a word.
My name. Spoken through a throat that doesn't use language often and has to work for every syllable.
Rough. Low. The consonants are soft and the vowels are long and he says it like he's tasting it.
Like he's been holding it in his mouth for days, practicing in the dark, waiting for me to be close enough to hear it.
"Yeah," I say. My voice comes out wrecked. "That's me."
He takes another step. Closer. The heat radiating off him meets the heat radiating off me and where they overlap the air shimmers.
His eyes drop to my left wrist.
I look down. In the dim orange light, the mark has darkened since my room.
RJ sees it. His whole body reacts — a visible shudder that runs from his shoulders to his hands. His lips part. And the sound he makes isn't a growl or a word. It's an exhale that carries everything — recognition, relief, something that sounds terrifyingly close to reverence.
He reaches for me.
His hand comes up. Slow. Shaking. The fingers are long and scarred and they move through the air between us like they're pushing through water.
He's fighting himself — I can see it in the tension of his arm, the way his jaw grinds.
The human part of him knows he shouldn't touch me. The other part doesn't care.
I don't step back.
His fingertips stop an inch from my wrist. Hovering.
I can feel the ghost of his touch without contact.
Every nerve in my wrist is screaming and my whole body is leaning toward him, closing the distance by fractions, because the inch between his fingers and my skin is the longest distance I have ever felt.
"RJ." My voice is barely a whisper and his name ends on a sound I've never made before — low, desperate, a whine pulled from somewhere behind my ribs.
My body is shaking. Not fear. Need. The kind that's past want, past decision, past anything my brain has authority over.
I need his hands on me. I need the weight of him pressing me into something solid.
I need his mouth on my throat and his teeth on my skin and I need to stop thinking and let whatever is between us have what it wants.
My thighs are trembling and I'm wet and he hasn't even touched me.
His fingertips touch my skin.
My vision goes blank — pure, searing — and crashes back in overloaded color and I'm gasping and his hand is around my wrist and the mark is screaming under his grip and every nerve in my body fires at once.
His touch is a match and I am gasoline and days of wanting him just detonated in my bloodstream.