Chapter 7
Him
The drug hooks into my bloodstream and pulls.
I go down in layers. The ceiling blurs first—water stains, a crack running corner to corner, the light fixture with one dead bulb. Then the walls. Then the edges of the room soften.
But the fragments don’t line up.
Her wrist in my hand. Thin. Warm. The bones shifting under my grip.
The syringe.
Her voice.
Wait.
Backward now—my palm flat against her spine, the heat of her skin through fabric, her pulse kicking against my thumb. I wasn’t counting it. But my body was.
The drug spreads cold through my veins, thick as syrup, but the memory cuts through it.
Wait.
One word. No command behind it. No white coats. No restraints. No humming equipment and the taste of blood in the back of my throat.
She asked. Gently.
My hand opens on the blanket. Closes. Opens again.
The motion belongs to me. A small act of autonomy that’s becoming more and more frequent.
I count it. One. Two. Three. Like measures.
Like the downbeat before the orchestra comes in, except I can’t remember where I learned that.
Can’t remember the room with tall windows or the scuffed floor or the way afternoon light fell across music stands.
It’s just there. The counting. The rhythm.
The reflex my hands remember even when my mind can’t understand why.
But before the syringe…warm water.
Cloth on my skin.
Her hands.
Surfacing through the drug, not slow but fast. Like breaking through ice. One second, dark. The next: her scent, her wrist, my wolf hurling forward with something that wasn’t escape.
My hand on her back. Fingers spread across her spine. Her palm flat against my chest.
And then—
The vibration.
It started in my sternum and moved toward her hand like something answering. It spread through my ribs, my shoulders, the bones of my arm where I held her wrist, and for one second, the fog burned clean.
No facility. No drug. No number tattooed on my arm in black ink.
Just the vibration.
Just her pulse.
Just wanting something I don’t have words for.
Then she said wait, and my hand opened, and the clarity went with it.
Now I’m back under.
Or I should be.
My fingers curl into the blanket. Wool. Rough.
The texture scrapes my palm the way the facility cots never did.
Their bedding was slick and synthetic and held nothing—no warmth, no weight, no evidence that a body had ever lain there long enough to matter.
Sometimes I was sure they were there to catch body fluids more than to give comfort.
This blanket holds warmth.
She put it on me. Tucked it around my shoulders. I remember that from other days, other doses. The edge of the blanket pulled up to my chin. The same hands that change dressings. Press a cloth to my forehead when the fever spikes.
Her hands.
She’s been touching me for weeks.
I know it in pieces, the way I know everything under the drugs. Her grip under my elbow when she turns me. Her fingers at my pulse. The press of gauze. The scrape of a razor along my jaw, her thumb steady beneath my chin.
Hands near my throat should make me fight.
Hers don’t.
That should scare me more than it does.
The men who come into the room smell like braced muscle and bitten-back fear. Sweat. Adrenaline. Violence waiting for permission. My wolf tastes it before they reach the bed and bares his teeth because he can’t tell the difference between fear and threat when he’s cornered.
She doesn’t smell like that.
Lavender. Soap. Warm skin. No sharp chemical spike of terror. No hunger under the calm. When she touches me, my wolf goes quiet.
He went quiet today, too.
Her wrist trapped in my grip. Her pulse kicking against my thumb. The blood-hunger still beating in my skull.
The rest of her against me—solid, warm, real in a way nothing had been real for years. Her hip caught against mine. Her hand flat on my chest. The sharp little breath she took when I pulled her in. Not fear.
Not only fear.
And still, when she said wait, he listened.
I think about the syringe.
She held it up. Let me see it. Told me what it was. Told me where she’d put it. Said now before the needle went in.
Dr. Fell never told me first.
Dr. Fell told me after, if she told me at all, and the explanation wasn’t for me.
It was for the file. For the record. For the neat columns of data that charted response times, suppression thresholds, and how much voltage it took to keep me down.
She’d write her notes while I was still shaking, the pen scratching across paper, her voice flat and clinical as she narrated what she’d done like I wasn’t in the room.
Sable looked me in the eye.
She gave me a warning she didn’t have to give.
The drug pulls harder now. The room recedes. The crack in the ceiling blurs. The dead bulb becomes two, then three, then a smear of light I can’t focus on.
But the wool is still rough under my fingers.
I think about her wrist. The bones were small. Bird bones. Hollow. The skin was thin enough that I could see the veins running blue underneath, and I could’ve closed my fist and ended something.
The wolf wanted to hold on.
Not to hurt. To keep.
The distinction is jarring. The facility taught my hands two things: force or release. Grip until they sedate you or let go when the pain stops. There isn’t a third option between those two things. There isn’t a grip that just…holds.
But I found one.
I held her. I didn’t break her. I let go when she asked.
My fingers open on the blanket. Stay open. The tremor is gone. My palm rests flat against the wool, and the wool is rough and real and warm. Someone tucked it around my shoulders, and the someone was her.
Time doesn’t work right. It didn’t work right in the facility, either. Days blurred into tests, tests into restraints, restraints into the flat certainty that fighting only made the next dose stronger, and stopping didn’t make any of it end. But I stopped today, and the punishment didn’t come.
No table.
No humming equipment.
No hands forcing me down while the needle found the port they’d carved into my arm.
She stepped back. She put the needle where she said she would. Her voice shook—just once, just at the edge—and she did it anyway.
I think about her palm on my chest.
The vibration.
The pull.
The drug drags me deeper. The room goes soft at the corners, soft at the edges, soft everywhere except the place in my chest where the warmth is lodged.
My hand lies open on the blanket.
I can still feel the shape of her wrist in my palm. The small bones. The beat of her pulse. The moment my fingers unlocked one by one because she asked, and some part of me wanted to be the kind of thing that could answer.
Wait.
Her voice goes down with me.
So does the choice.
Not the needle. Not the room. Not the lock.
That.
My hand opening.
I hold onto it as long as I can.
The drug takes the rest.