Chapter 5 #2
I watch him go, then glance back at the compound, where the lights on the healers’ wing are glowing.
The twelve-hour vitals check is mine. Brenna mandated full protocol, and full protocol means round-the-clock monitoring for the first forty-eight hours after a dose adjustment.
It’s a legitimate reason to walk back into the wing at ten o’clock at night with my kit in my hand and my notebook under my arm.
Inside, it’s nearly dark, only the low corridor lamp burning at half-strength.
Dara is asleep. Tomas is not, but he is pretending well enough that I let him keep the pretense.
Dane has been released from observation and is almost certainly somewhere he shouldn’t be, doing something I told him not to do.
The locked room is at the end of the corridor.
I press my ear to the door. Silence. Steady breathing.
I unlock it, slip inside, and check his vitals by lamplight—pulse, pupil response, temperature, respiration rate.
Everything is where it should be. The sedation is holding.
His face is slack, his hands loose. The bruise on his cheekbone has already faded to yellow.
I write the readings in my notebook. Date, time, values. Below them, in the corner of the page, I have written the number once. 3-0-6-7-0. The only thread I have to pull.
I stare at it. Then I cross it out.
The pencil line tears the paper.
I close the notebook, slip out, and lock the door behind me.
The vitals check is done. The professional obligation has been met. I should go to my room.
Instead, I sit in the chair outside his door. Wooden, hard-backed, not made for comfort. I put the notebook on my lap and the pencil on top of it, and I tell myself I’m just writing up Arden’s notes while they’re fresh. That is reasonable. That is something a healer would do.
I close my eyes for one minute.
Just one…
I wake to a voice through the door. Not a snarl. Not the broken sounds I have heard from him in sedation.
A voice. A man’s voice, low and rough with disuse. But there’s something underneath the roughness—a depth, a warmth that has no right being there after what they’ve done to him. My wolf lifts her head before I do.
I straighten slowly so the chair doesn’t creak. The notebook has slipped sideways on my lap. The pencil is on the floor. My neck aches from the angle of sleep.
For a second, I reach for the key. Full protocol suppresses the dream cycle. A wolf under this dose doesn’t talk in his sleep; he doesn’t have the neural activity for it. I checked his levels when I got here. Everything was where it should be.
He shouldn’t be speaking.
I press my ear to the door. His breathing is steady; the same slow rhythm I measured during the vitals check. The sedation is holding. But the voice is there, moving underneath it, and every instinct I have as a healer says this isn’t possible. But every instinct I have as a wolf says listen.
Most of the words are swallowed by the door.
But the shape comes through, sentences, pauses, a rise and fall that follows a pattern.
He speaks, stops, leaves space for an answer that does not come, then continues.
The cadence is precise. Patient. The rhythm of a man explaining something and waiting for someone to understand.
I lower myself to the floor before I decide to.
The boards are cold through my pants. I sit with my back to the wall beside his door and my ear close enough to catch the sound. Closer, some words break through.
“…from the top. Watch your—”
Silence. Then a shift. A breath.
“…no. Lighter. Feel the weight, don’t—”
He’s…instructing someone. Like a teacher. Was he a teacher before this? I can’t reconcile that idea with the creature I’ve seen when he changes.
More silence. His voice drops, and I lose him for a while. When it rises again, the tone has changed. Harder. Not instructing anymore.
“No.” A sharp inhale, and then, “No!”
The anguish in it makes me want to rush in there, to soothe him, but I don’t. I shouldn’t even be here, dammit.
The voice comes again. “…faith has no mercy…”
The words are clear enough to make me press closer. Faith. Mercy. I don’t know what they mean. A prayer, maybe, from a man who has reason to doubt one. Or something else entirely.
He talks for a while longer. Not to me. Not to anyone in this building. To rooms that exist somewhere beneath the drugs—one where he teaches, one where he suffers. The two bleed together, as if he can’t tell the difference in his sleep.
And the more I listen, the more my body quiets.
The tension I’ve been carrying since Greta’s list this morning—the names, the grief, the compound’s strained silence—all of it loosens.
My breathing slows. My hands go still on the notebook in my lap.
The ache in my neck fades to something I can ignore.
It’s like sitting beside a fire you didn’t know was lit, heat you only notice when you realize you’ve stopped shivering.
It’s his voice.
It can’t be.
But I know it is. It’s his voice doing it. Some quality in the register, something below the words themselves. I don’t understand it. My body doesn’t care. My body says stay.
I stay longer than I need to.
He goes quiet eventually. His breathing slows. The room settles.
When I finally stand, my knees are stiff and my back aches. I pick up the notebook and the pencil. I don’t open the door. I don’t touch the lock.
There is nothing to do tonight that will make a difference to anything.
At least that’s what I tell myself.
I go to my room and lie down in the dark with the notebook on my chest.
Dr. Fell.
Faith has no mercy.
Two fragments. One from Arden, one from a sedated man talking in his sleep.
I write them on the same page because I don’t know where else to put them. Dr. Fell is a person, or was. Someone attached to the thirty-series. Someone Arden remembered because even the staff spoke the name carefully.
The other phrase is harder. Faith has no mercy. A prayer, maybe. A warning. The broken edge of something he heard or said while the drugs dragged him through whatever room he was trapped in.
I don’t know if they connect.
But whatever they did to him, they left something alive enough to speak in the dark. To teach a student who isn’t there. To hold the rhythm of a lesson even when the walls are wrong, and the room is locked, and nobody is listening.
Except me.
I need to find out what he was before they made him this.