9. ~Riot~ #2
“She’s arresting,” Silas says—something about her heart, a word I half understand and wholly hate—and the growl comes roaring back up out of me, because they’re laying her flat now, tearing the orange away from her chest, and strangers in white are descending with paddles and wires, and every protective instinct I own is screaming that they’re hurting her.
It takes six guards to put me down. Six, and a knee in my back, and still I’m half-rising, snarling, watching them hook my Omega up to a machine that’s about to do violence to her on purpose.
The first shock jolts through her.
Her body leaps and falls back.
Still.
And there it is again—the third panic, the one I was promised, arriving right on schedule.
The same clawing helplessness as a kitchen floor twenty years gone, the same unbearable knowledge that all my strength, every brutal useful thing these hands have ever done, is worthless against this. I cannot punch a stopped heart back into rhythm. I cannot threaten death into letting go.
For the second time in my life I am holding something precious while it leaves, and being too strong to help and too late to matter, and the helplessness is a kind of agony I’d genuinely forgotten the flavor of.
The second. The leap, the fall.
Still.
The whole cafeteria has stopped breathing—two hundred lunatics and a dozen guards and three obsessed men all holding the same held breath—and the third shock spikes through her, and this time she gasps.
A huge, ragged, drowning inhale, her chest heaving up off the floor, and she coughs—blood, bright and startling—and her head lolls to the side, and she’s breathing, she’s gasping and hacking and groaning low and weak, and the sound of it is the single best thing these ears have heard since a kitchen long ago went quiet.
Silas is barking orders now, fast and surgical, Lucien answering in the same clipped key, and the room fills with professionals in white and a knot of handlers in jumpsuits and a gurney that swallows her small body and starts to move.
I don’t care about any of it.
I care about exactly one thing: following where they’re taking her.
The guards still pinning me clearly disagree, and we’re briefly relitigating that disagreement with my full bodyweight when Lucien turns his head and looks at me—really looks, reading whatever’s written across my face and finding it legible enough.
“Let him go,” he says. “He won’t be a problem if he can see her.”
It’s the truest thing anyone has said about me in years. The hands ease off. I rise, shake them loose, and follow the gurney without another sound, because he’s right—the leash on me is her, and as long as she’s in my sightline I’m the calmest monster in the building.
They wheel her into a medical bay that smells of antiseptic and ozone, and before long she’s a small still shape webbed in tubes and wires, a clear mask fogging and clearing over her mouth, her vitals scrolling green across a screen I can’t read and can’t stop staring at.
And then—there.
The beeping settles. Falls into a rhythm.
The same steady interval, again and again and again, a metronome of a heartbeat that has decided to keep going, and it’s that sound, that dull mechanical promise, that finally lets the red drain out of my vision and the higher rooms of my brain switch their lights back on.
Which is how I become able to follow the argument happening over her bed.
I don’t join it. I’ve got nothing useful to add to a conversation about timelines and compounds, and besides, I’ve found a job: watching her breathe.
The mask fogs and clears, fogs and clears, and I count the cycles the way I used to count the seconds between a guard’s rounds, because counting is what I do when there’s nothing left to hit.
Up close, drained of all her colour, she looks younger and smaller and nothing at all like the lunatic who held a room of forty hostage with a smile.
She looks like a girl.
It does something complicated to the wreckage where my chest is supposed to be, and I decide, on the spot and without consulting anyone, that whoever did this to her is going to learn the same lesson my father did about the durability of his skull.
Lucien and Silas are calm.
The redhead—the scentless detective, Hale—is not.
She’s pacing the foot of the bed like a thing in a cage, and she rounds on the pair of them with her voice climbing toward a register the equipment probably objects to.
“What the hell is going on in this building,” she demands, “where a saw blade gets installed in a cafeteria ceiling and not one of three hundred people notices? Where a patient gets her hands on a syringe loaded with a compound potent enough to drop a grown woman in under five minutes? That drug should have killed Genevieve outright. It nearly did. If either of you had been off-site by ten minutes, she’d be on his table instead of on this bed. ”
“And I would have given her a magnificent send-off,” Silas murmurs, entirely unbothered, examining his own pale fingers. “Ranunculus, I think. Something layered and secret. But alas—her fate wasn’t meant to end this afternoon.”
Hale glares at the poetry like she’d like to confiscate it.
“You,” she says flatly, “saved her. You put your own mouth on a dying woman to bring her back. Which means, whatever else is true in this circus, you don’t want her dead.”
Silas shrugs, serene.
“I haven’t had a proper color analysis with her yet,” he says, as though that explains a single thing to anyone but him. “It would be terribly premature to let her die before I have.”
The detective looks, for a moment, like her own skull might do an impression of Annalise’s—and that’s when Doc steps in, smooth as oil on water, his quiet voice cutting her spiral clean in half.
“Walk me through your theory, Detective,” he says.
“You still believe she orchestrated this. So—she plotted to have a blade rigged into a ceiling she can’t reach, arranged to be injected with a lethal dose of a sedative-class compound immediately after swallowing her own lunch medications, calculated that the combination would stop her heart, and counted on being resuscitated by the precise two men in the building capable of it.
That’s the plan you’re proposing. A woman engineering her own cardiac arrest as an alibi. ”
Hale doesn’t answer.
“You know she isn’t running these murders,” Doc says, gentler and therefore worse.
“You’ve known it since the timeline cleared her on the last one.
Someone is targeting her. Someone wants her gone, or wants her buried under enough bodies that no one will look any closer.
The only question worth your time is why. ”
None of them have an answer.
The medbay fills with the patient beeping of the one heart in the room that isn’t scheming.
“She’s the only patient who can reach that ceiling,” Hale says finally, stubborn to the last.
“With a pole,” Doc agrees. “Which she has, in her cell, under a camera. But there’s no pole in that section of the cafeteria, Detective, and unless she’s recently developed the ability to sling webs from her wrists, scaling forty feet of bare ceiling unnoticed in a crowded room is a tall order.
No one saw the blade go up, which means it was installed in a narrow window right before the lunch bell—a window during which your prime suspect was, per the footage I personally reviewed, doing exactly what she’s done for three days straight since Wren Halloway died.
Spinning on a pole in a locked room. Watched. Counted. Filmed.”
The woman says nothing.
And I can’t help it.
I chuckle.
It rolls out of me low and rough, and it’s apparently loud enough in all that tense quiet that every head in the room swings my way like I’ve started speaking in tongues.
They’d half forgotten I was here—the feral prisoner, demoted to furniture once the drama moved on.
But I’m not where they left me. I’m at the head of the bed, lowered into a chair too small for me, and I’m holding her hand.
It’s a small hand. Clever, callused at the palm from the pole, and far too pale right now, the same drained grey as the rest of her, and I hate the color of it with a violence that surprises me.
But under my thumb her pulse ticks along in time with the machine, steady, stubborn, alive, and the rhythm of it is the only thing keeping me on the civilized side of the chair.
“If you need eyes on her every minute of every day,” I say, into their staring silence, “to keep her breathing and to keep her clear of whatever’s hunting her—” I shrug, and tighten my grip on those cold clever fingers.
“—then quit pretending you’ll manage it with cameras and counts that already failed her twice today.
Assign a pack. One of us with her. Always.
Rotate it however helps you sleep, but she’s never alone again. ”
The silence that follows is enormous.
It’s a self-serving suggestion and everyone in the room knows it, knows precisely what three obsessed men are angling for under the bland logic of patient safety.
But it’s also airtight, and that’s the trap of it—the cameras did fail, the counts did fail, the institution’s every system left her bleeding on a cafeteria floor, and the only thing in this building that got to her in time was a prisoner who broke every rule to be there.
I watch Hale’s frown carve deeper as she fails to find the flaw, and the deepening is its own answer: I’m making sense, and she despises such.
Across the bed, Doc doesn’t look at me, but I catch the faint thing his mouth does—the ghost of approval he’d never admit to, the look of a man watching a clumsy instrument play exactly the right note by accident. He won’t say it. He doesn’t have to.
The three of us have wanted the same impossible thing since the day we each walked into her orbit, and I’ve just handed the institution a reason to gift-wrap it and call it protocol. A pack assignment.
One of us, always, at her side.
The cage she built to keep everyone out, about to be staffed by the only three men determined to stay in.
She says nothing at all. She simply turns on her heel and stalks out of the medbay, the door hissing shut behind her stiff retreating spine.
And in the quiet she leaves, over the steady metronome of the heartbeat I dragged back into the world, I hear Silas’s low, delighted chuckle from the foot of the bed.
“Our growling brother,” he murmurs, “is a fucking genius.”