Chapter 2
Him
The world comes back in pieces. Cold floor under me. Blood thick on my tongue, iron and salt. Something tight across my chest—no, not restraints, just the way my ribs refuse to expand. Breathing costs too much.
I don’t remember hitting the ground.
The drug spreads through my veins, numbing everything it touches. My fingers won’t close. My eyelids weigh a thousand pounds. Somewhere distant, my wolf claws at the inside of my skull, snarling, but the sound is muffled. Drowning.
Hands.
That’s what I remember. Hands on my arms. Hands pulling. The room slipping away, furniture crashing, and then—
Claws.
Mine. Theirs. Blood on the floor. Someone’s arm torn open, white bone showing through red. The wolf surging up my spine, half-formed and rabid, because the room was too small and the hands wouldn’t stop and—
Then the needle.
Always the fucking needle.
I try to lift my head. Can’t. The ceiling swims above me, water-stained and gray. The light fixture bends like it’s melting. My pulse thuds slow and thick in my ears, each beat a countdown to nothing.
Voices filter in. Male. Low. Talking somewhere beyond my field of vision.
“—hit a wall.”
“Wall should’ve moved.”
Laughter. Brief. Forced. Then footsteps, fading.
I don’t know where I am.
I know I was somewhere else before. The details come in flashes: concrete walls, fluorescent lights that stayed on through the night, the smell of disinfectant layered over urine and fear.
The exam room with the steel table and the leather straps worn smooth from use.
The observation window where faces appeared and disappeared without speaking.
And her. Dr. Fell. Small hands. Cool, dry fingers pressing two fingers to the inside of my wrist, counting, measuring. Her other hand making notes that I couldn’t see.
“Good morning, 3-0-6-7-0.”
The number, every time. Never anything else. Then the needle.
Is this still that place?
My chest tightens. I can’t get enough air. The room presses in, walls closing, and I try to move, but my body won’t obey. The drug has me pinned like an insect on a board.
Then…a scent.
Soft. Clean. Not antiseptic. Something warmer. Lavender, maybe. Soap. It cuts through the fog just enough to register as different.
That scent has been here from the start. A detail my wolf attaches to even when the rest of me is under. Part of me does too. It feels…settling. I don’t have a better word for it.
Footsteps approach. Light. Careful. Not the measured stride of someone walking toward a task. The cautious steps of someone approaching something that might bite.
I force my eyes open a crack.
The woman kneels beside me. The one with the scent. Dark hair pulled back. Brown eyes that don’t look at me the way Dr. Fell did, not like I’m a specimen or a problem to solve. She’s looking at me the way you look at something hurt. Like the hurt matters.
She reaches for my wrist.
Her fingers settle against the inside of it, finding the pulse point—same position, same two fingers—and my body braces. Jaw locked. Breath held. Waiting for what always follows.
But she just holds.
Two fingers on my pulse. Counting.
Something stirs in my chest. Low. Below the sedation, below the panic, somewhere the drug hasn’t reached. A vibration—faint, shapeless—that moves toward her fingers. My wolf goes still. His awareness turns toward the place where her skin meets mine, listening to something I can’t hear.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers.
Then the needle.
The sting should make the words meaningless. It should turn her into every white coat, every cool hand, every voice that said my number before the pain began.
But the apology stays.
No one apologizes. Not in the white room. Not when the restraints bite into skin, and the lights stay on all night. Not when the runes carved into your flesh burn like they’re still fresh.
Dr. Fell never said sorry.
She said, “Noted.”
She said, “Increase stimulus by twelve percent.”
This woman says sorry, and my body doesn’t know what to do with it.
Her hand moves to my forehead, brushing my hair back.
The touch is gentle. Her fingers trail across my temple, and the vibration in my chest shifts, becomes warmer.
For half a second, the fog thins. The room stops pressing.
The weight on my lungs eases just enough that I pull in a full breath, and the breath comes easier than it should. I don’t know why.
I flinch anyway.
She pulls back immediately, and I lose sight of her. The room spins. I sense the wreckage, destroyed furniture, equipment strewn about.
I did that.
The memory surfaces sluggish and incomplete.
Waking up. Everything too close. The walls too tight. Panic clawing up my throat because I couldn’t remember how I got here, or why I was still alive when they usually kill the ones who fight back.
But not me.
I’m worth too much to them.
The thought lands with the same sick certainty it always does. They don’t keep me breathing because they’re merciful. They keep me breathing because someone decided I’m useful.
They’ll never let me go.
Doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop trying.
I remember the door ahead of me, promising freedom.
Freedom. Fuck… if only.
“He’s up!” someone had yelled. “I can hear him moving inside there.”
I’d barely had time to register that they were talking about me before the door opened. Three men. Big. Moving fast.
Hands again.
I fought. I think I fought. Something tore.
Someone’s arm. I remember the curse, brief and sharp, before it cut off into a grunt of pain.
I remember the sound my claws made on the floorboards, a screech that set my teeth wrong, a frequency that vibrated up through my wrists and into my chest and made the wolf lunge harder.
My stomach twists. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to know.
The woman—Sable, I’ve heard them call her Sable—is moving around the room now.
I hear the clink of glass, the rustle of supplies being gathered.
Her footsteps are quieter than the men’s.
Lighter. There’s a rhythm to them—counter to table, table to shelf, shelf to basin.
Practiced. A pattern she’s walked many times.
My wolf tracks her through the room without lifting his head.
Every footstep registers. Every shift in her scent, the lavender fading as she moves away, strengthening as she passes close.
The wolf isn’t snarling anymore. He stopped when she touched my wrist. He’s lying low in my chest, ears forward, following her the way you follow a sound you almost recognize.
A knock at the door. Male voices again, overlapping.
“Healer Sable?”
“My mother asked us to come help clear up.”
She answers, but I can’t make out the words. The drug is pulling me under again, slow and inevitable. My vision blurs. The ceiling becomes a smear of gray.
More footsteps. Heavier this time. Three sets.
My wolf stirs, sluggish and sedated but still snarling. Threat. Hands. Run.
But I can’t run. I can’t even lift my fucking head.
“How’s he doing?”
The voice is young. Male. Concerned in a way that doesn’t compute.
“No change. Got some bumps and scrapes during the scuffle, a gash on his arm, but he’ll be okay.”
Scuffle. Like I’m a dog that bit someone. Like it was just an accident.
That’s different, too. Before, escape came with consequences. Always. A dislocated shoulder wrenched back into place without anesthesia. An extra session on the table. Dr. Fell’s flat voice: “Noted. Increase restraint protocol for next session.”
Here, the word they use is scuffle.
I hear them moving around the room, lifting things, righting furniture. Something scrapes across the floor. Someone grunts with effort.
Then, closer. Too close.
Hands slide under my shoulders. Under my knees. Lifting.
The wolf roars. I try to thrash, try to get free, but my body is dead weight. My claws won’t extend. My teeth won’t shift.
“Easy,” one of them says. “We’ve got you.”
No. No. Hands. Table. Restraints. The runes burning into skin.
But then…her scent. Stronger now. Right there.
I force my eyes open again, just a slit; it’s getting harder now, after the second needle. She’s between them and me. Her body a barrier, her hands hovering like she’s not sure whether to touch me or push them back.
“Carefully,” she says. Her voice is steady. Firm. “Set him down carefully.”
They lower me onto something soft. A mattress. Not the exam table. Not the restraint chair.
A bed.
The hands retreat. I hear shuffling, murmured conversation, footsteps fading.
Then it’s just her again.
She’s pulling a blanket up over me. Tucking it around my shoulders. The gesture is so ordinary, so normal, that it takes me a second to understand what she’s doing.
No one tucks you in at the facility. No one makes sure you’re warm.
Her hand hovers over my arm. I can feel the warmth of her skin, close but not touching.
The vibration in my chest stirs again, that low, formless thing that the drug should have buried but didn’t.
It rises toward her hand. For a second, my body hums with something that isn’t pain and isn’t fear and isn’t the wolf’s territorial snarl.
Then she pulls back, and it fades, and the cold fills in where the warmth was.
I want to tell her something. I don’t know what. Maybe thank you. Maybe don’t leave. Maybe who the fuck are you, and why aren’t you hurting me yet?
But my tongue is too heavy. My throat won’t work.
She stands. I hear her moving around the room again. The sound of glass against metal. A cabinet closing. Small, careful sounds. The sounds of someone putting a broken place back in order.
Then she walks to the door.
I try to turn my head, try to see if she’s really leaving, but my body won’t cooperate. All I can do is listen.
The door opens. Closes.
The lock clicks.
My body hears it before my mind does. Every muscle that can still answer goes tight. My fingers drag once against the blanket, useless, searching for purchase they won’t find.
Locked.
Of course it’s locked.
The room is warmer than the white room. The bed is softer. The blanket still holds the shape of her hands where she pulled it over my shoulders.
The lock sounds the same.
Different room. Different woman. Same cage.
The darkness pulls at me, thick and suffocating. I sink into it because I don’t have a choice.
But the last thing I register before I go under is the contradiction burning in my chest:
She tucked me in.
And then she locked the door.