Chapter 55
Elora
The chains sang her awake.
Not the soft jingle of a warning—the harsh metallic shriek of her own wrists yanking against the manacles as she bolted upright, gasping, her heart slamming so hard against her ribs she thought they might crack.
The chain clacked against the wall, and the cold iron bit deeper into already raw skin.
Her fingers were slick with something warm and wet.
Blood or sweat or both—she couldn’t tell, couldn’t focus, couldn’t breathe past the images still clawing at the back of her skull.
Gerard’s face. Thorn’s hands. The bed in the lab, the restraints, the needle. All of it layered over and over, each memory sharper than the last, until her body couldn’t tell the difference between nightmare, memory and reality.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, hot and relentless. She couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t even feel them falling. Her whole body shook, every muscle locked rigid, and the chains rattled with each tremor.
“It’s me. Elora. It’s me.”
The voice cut through the haze. Warm. Close. Too close.
Her vision swam, blurred by tears and the lingering fragments of the dream, but she didn’t need clear sight to recognize him. She felt him—the solid weight on the thin cot beside her, the heat radiating off his body, the hand on her shoulder gripping tight enough to bruise.
Rell.
She tried to speak, but her throat was raw, scraped raw from the scream she must have let loose in her sleep. Her lips moved, forming nothing. Her chest heaved with each ragged breath, and the sound that came out was a fractured sound she immediately hated.
“Hey. Hey, look at me.” His hand slid from her shoulder to her jaw, tilting her face toward his. His thumb swept across her cheekbone wiping away tears. “It was just a nightmare. You’re safe. You’re here. It’s me.”
Safe. The word felt almost cruel. Nothing about this cell was safe.
Nothing about The Institute, this plan, this entire charade.
And him—sitting on her cot in the middle of the night, touching her face like she was something important to him, something worth protecting—he was the most dangerous thing of all.
Because he was not meant to be here.
The thought cut through the fog with sudden, vicious clarity.
He wasn’t supposed to care. He was supposed to be cold, detached, indifferent.
The circus beast handler turned bounty hunter who’d sold her back to Thorn.
That was the role. That was the lie they’d built together, brick by careful brick, and he was tearing it down with every gentle stroke of his thumb.
She jerked away from his hand.
“Don’t—” The word came out cracked and ragged, barely audible. She tried again, forcing air through her ruined throat. “Don’t.”
His hand followed her, cupping the side of her face, pushing damp hair back from her forehead. His fingers trembled against her skin, subtle enough she might’ve missed it if he weren’t touching her. The tremor made something twist deep in her chest that she resented instantly.
“Easy. Easy, it’s just a nightmare. You’re still half-asleep, you don’t—”
She shoved his hand away. Hard. Her palm cracked against his wrist, and the impact sent a jolt of pain up her arm where the manacle had dug into bone.
“Stop.” The word came out sharp, almost a snarl. “I said don’t.”
His hand caught hers instinctively before he seemed to realize what he was doing and immediately loosened.
The loosening made it worse somehow. She planted both hands against his chest and shoved. “Get off.” Her arm was shaking so badly she could barely hold it straight, but she shoved again anyway. “You can’t be in here. You can’t keep—”
“Relax. Just breathe for a minute.”
The cell door screamed open.
Light flooded in—harsh, white, clinical—and for one frozen second, Elora couldn’t see anything but the silhouette framed in the doorway. Tall. Broad-shouldered. The pristine fall of academic robes.
Thorn.
Her breath caught in her throat. Her body went rigid—every muscle locking at once, every nerve ending firing in a single, unified shriek of danger.
Rell’s hand was still on her, cupping her shoulder.
His body too close, angled toward her like a shield, like he’d been about to pull her against his chest.
She watched Thorn’s gaze travel from her tear-streaked face to Rell’s hands on her, and something shifted behind those dead, calculating eyes. Not anger. Not surprise. Something colder. Something that was catalogued and filed and stored away for later use.
Rell was on his feet before she could blink.
He released her so fast her arm dropped like a stone, the chains clanking against the wall.
He straightened to his full height, shoulders squaring, and the softness that had been in his voice moments ago was gone, replaced by something flat and bored, something that belonged to a mercenary who’d been woken up by a crying prisoner.
“She was having a nightmare.” Rell’s voice carried the casual irritation of a man discussing a broken alarm clock. “Couldn’t sleep with all the crying and moaning. Figured I’d shut her up before she woke the whole damn wing.”
Elora pulled her knees to her chest.
“Is that because it is distressing for you to hear?” Thorn asked, his voice carrying that clinical curiosity. His eyes remained fixed on Rell, taking in every detail of his posture, his expression, the way he stood just slightly between Thorn and the cot.
Rell scoffed. “Distressing? No. Just really annoying.” He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture deliberately casual. “Every fucking night while traveling with her. I nearly let her go just so I could get some damn sleep.”
Elora watched the exchange through narrowed eyes, her heart still hammering against her ribs. The lie came easily to Rell’s lips, but something in the set of his shoulders betrayed him—a tension that hadn’t been there before Thorn entered.
Thorn’s expression didn’t change, but Elora caught the slight narrowing of his eyes, the way his fingers drummed once against his thigh. “You’re very gentle with her,” he observed, his tone deceptively mild. “Her nightmares annoy you, yet I see no red handprint on her face.”
The air in the cell seemed to grow thicker, harder to breathe.
Elora pulled her chains closer, the metal biting into her wrists as she tried to make herself smaller, less noticeable.
Every instinct screamed at her to transform, to let the nightglider surge forward and tear into Thorn’s throat, but she kept the beast locked down, contained.
Rell shifted his weight, his hand falling to rest on the knife at his belt—a casual gesture that might have fooled anyone else. “Hitting her would make the beast perceive me as a threat,” he explained, his voice carefully measured. “It would set back a lot of the work I’ve done to tame her.”
The word “tame” sent a fresh wave of revulsion through Elora. She bit down on her tongue, tasting copper as she forced herself to remain still, to play her part.
Thorn’s lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “You told me the conditioning doesn’t work on the human mind,” he said, “only on the beast.”
The quiet that came after was deafening.
Elora felt a lump in her throat as she watched Rell’s face carefully for any sign of panic, any crack in the carefully constructed facade.
Their entire plan hinged on this moment—on Rell’s ability to lie to a man who had spent decades perfecting the art of manipulation.
Rell’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “The human mind is what controls the beast,” he said after a moment. “You hit the woman, the beast gets angry. Simple cause and effect.”
Thorn considered this, his head tilting to one side like a bird studying something it intended to eat. The silence stretched, and Elora counted each heartbeat, each shallow breath, each metallic tick of the chain against stone.
“Reasonable,” Thorn said at last. The word came out with the flat approval of a man grading an exam.
“Given your claimed expertise in managing her, I’d expect you could bring the beast back under control the moment she lets it loose.
” He paused, letting the implication settle.
“You’ve spent weeks conditioning her. Surely you could handle a single shift. ”
Elora watched Rell’s throat bob as he swallowed. His hand was still on his knife, fingers curling and uncurling around the hilt in a rhythm she recognized—the tell he thought nobody noticed.
“Sir, with respect—” Rell started.
“I’ve been meaning to ask for a demonstration.” Thorn cut him off, his voice smooth and unhurried. He stepped fully into the cell, and the space shrank around him like it always did, like the walls themselves recoiled from his presence. “Go on. Strike her.”
Rell didn’t move.
Elora’s gaze snapped to him. She could see the muscles in his forearm twitching where his hand gripped the knife, the subtle shift of his weight from one foot to the other.
He was hesitating. Every second he hesitated was another second Thorn catalogued, another data point added to whatever calculation was running behind those dead eyes.
Just do it. The thought screamed through her skull, silent and desperate. Hit me. It’s fine. I’ll be fine. Just hit me and be done with it.
But she knew him. She knew the way his hands shook when he was angry, the way he’d rather break his own knuckles on a stone wall than raise them against someone he cared about.
She wasn’t sure he was physically capable of it. Not her.
Thorn’s gaze tracked from Rell’s frozen form to Elora and back again. The corner of his mouth twitched—not a smile, something colder. Something amused.
“You’re hesitating.”
“I was under the impression you didn’t want her harmed,” Rell said. His voice came out steady—remarkably steady, given the tension radiating off him like heat from a furnace.
“Correct, unless I say so.” His eyes locked onto Rell’s. “And I want you to hit her.”