Chapter 23
Rafael
The restraints are the same. Padded cuffs. Wrists, chest, ankles. But the fog is thinner this time. When I open my eyes, the ceiling has edges, and the monitors have numbers I can read. My heart rate: seventy-nine. My breathing: steady.
Stay calm.
My hands are open against the cot, palms flat, claws in. The shift is holding at a point I can manage: jaw heavier than it should be, shoulders too wide, but the teeth aren’t crowding, and my fingers still look like fingers.
Close enough.
I can work with close enough. If someone walks in, they need to see a man who can talk, reason, and answer questions without cracking their glass.
A man.
That is the part that matters.
Voices in the corridor.
Two people. A man and a woman. The man’s voice is low, measured, someone used to giving orders without raising his voice. The woman’s is clinical. Quick. They’re talking about me.
“…shift cycling has dropped significantly since the last sedation. Heart rate stable. Cortisol levels are still elevated but trending down—”
“And the magic? The sound waves?”
“Dormant since the last episode. No spikes.”
The containment door opens.
The man is tall. White-haired, dark-skinned. The same careful stillness I saw through the cracked glass when the doctor was in the observation room. Viktor Parlance. Director of this place. I’ve heard his voice through the intercom. Never face-to-face. Never in my cell.
He’s not in my cell now. He’s in the observation room, the cracked glass between us. The woman beside him wears a white coat. Tablet in hand. She pulls up my readings without looking at me.
Parlance looks at me.
His eyes move across the cot. The restraints. My hands…open, flat, deliberate. He takes his time. Reading me. Looking for what the numbers don’t show.
“He’s been stable for the last six hours,” the medic says. “Best window we’ve had since intake.”
I draw in a breath and focus on being calm.
“I can hear you,” I say.
Parlance’s chin lifts. The medic stops tapping her tablet.
“I know you’re talking about me.” My voice is rough. But the words are human. Formed. Clear enough. “And I know what my readings say.”
Viktor studies me. “You’re lucid.”
“I’ve been lucid. The gas makes it hard to show that.”
“The incidents suggest otherwise.”
“They were reactions to specific triggers,” I say. “Hands on me. Locked rooms. Sable being taken away. I’m not saying that makes them safe. I’m saying they weren’t random.”
I keep my voice level and my hands flat on the cot. Every movement controlled. Deliberate.
“I’m cooperating. You can see that.”
“What I can see,” Viktor says, “is a man who shattered inches of impenetrable glass two days ago. Who has required three sedation cycles. Whose magic has damaged monitoring equipment and injured staff.” He folds his arms. “You may be lucid right now. But you’ve shown too many signs of instability for me to take this at face value. ”
My jaw tightens. I want to argue. I want to tell him why the glass cracked…that Sable was crying, that she was walking away, that my body couldn’t tell the difference between losing her and losing everything. But that argument proves his point, not mine.
“I understand,” I say. “What do you need from me?”
“We need to run more assessments. Determine whether you can be stabilized long-term. Whether the episodes are controllable or whether the conditioning is too deeply embedded.” His voice is even.
Reasonable. Which makes it worse. “This is for your own good. You wouldn’t want to lose your grip and hurt someone. ”
He’s right. I know he’s right. The glass. The staffer. The monitoring equipment. Every time the wolf took over, I lost the ability to choose what happened next. Someone could have died. Sable could have been hurt.
Never. I would never!
“I’ll do whatever it takes,” I say. “Whatever tests you need. I’ll cooperate. I can prove that I’m safe around people.”
Viktor watches me for a long moment. Then he nods. Once. Not agreement…acknowledgment.
“There is a specialist,” he says. “Someone with insights into the kind of work that was done to you. They may be able to help us understand the frequency mechanisms and determine a path forward.”
For one dangerous second, hope gets past the restraints.
A specialist. Someone Sable found, maybe. Someone who knows the words for what was done to me and won’t turn those words into another cage.
“Okay,” I say. “When?”
“She’s here now.”
The containment door opens behind Viktor.
Flowers over chemicals.
No.
The sound of her shoes reaches me first.
Leather soles on hard flooring. A measured step that never hurries. The same step I heard every morning before the pain started.
She enters the observation room.
Pale hair. Pale suit. Pale eyes. Hands clasped behind her back.
My body goes before my mind catches up. My back arches off the cot, the cuffs biting into my wrists as every muscle fires at once.
Pulling. Straining. The chest strap cuts into my breastbone.
The shift I’ve been holding back tears through my shoulders, my spine, my hands, and my claws rip into the cot padding.
Not her.
Please not her.
A sound tears out of me, raw enough to hurt my throat. It fills the cell before I can stop it: panic with teeth, terror given shape, the noise of a body trying to escape when the straps are holding, and the walls are too close.
She is on the other side of the glass.
Right there.
Watching me with that tilt of her head.
“Get her out.” The words barely form. My jaw is wrong. Too heavy. “Get…her—”
“The subject is reacting to a familiar stimulus.” Her voice. Gentle. To Viktor. Not to me. Never to me, not when others are watching. Always about me. “This is not aggression. It will pass.”
“Get her OUT!”
The panel shudders.
I don’t mean to do it. I don’t even know what part of me has moved. One second her voice is in the room, soft and certain and poisonous, and the next the observation glass is groaning in its frame, the old cracks spreading like ice under pressure.
The monitors spike. The medic stumbles back from her station.
“What’s happening?” says Parlance.
“Director.” Creed’s voice comes from the doorway. I didn’t see him arrive. Dark gear. Arms crossed. Calm, because he isn’t the one strapped to a cot with her perfume in his lungs. “Dr. Fell has managed this subject for five years. She understands his responses. I’d recommend giving her the room.”
“She—” My voice catches. “She’s not—”
The shift takes my mouth before I can force the rest out. My jaw won’t hold its shape. My tongue is too thick. The words I need are there—table, scalpel, years, she did this—but they break apart before they reach the air.
Viktor watches me through the fractured glass.
I know what he sees.
Cuffs. Claws. Spiking monitors. A half-shifted wolf shredding the cot while the researcher stands calm on the other side.
Faith sees it too.
“You see?” she says to Viktor, quiet and almost sad. “The cognitive function degrades under stress. He can’t maintain speech with the shift active. This is what I was describing. Your suppression protocols are damaging the neural pathways I spent years calibrating.”
“What’s the solution?” Parlance is frowning.
“Give me five minutes with him. Behind the glass. Just to assess.”
“No!” The word comes out as a howl, but I can’t help it.
“Dr. Fell knows what she’s doing, Director,” Creed says. “If anyone knows how to handle this subject, it’s her.”
Viktor looks at me—cuffed, half-shifted, clawing at my own restraints, unable to form a sentence—and pulls in a breath.
“Fine,” he says. “If you have a way to fix this, I’ll give you five minutes.”
No.
Not inside.
Not where she can lower her voice and put her hands where the cameras won’t understand what they’re seeing.
The medic moves to the monitoring station. A guard guides Faith out of the observation area. I hear their footsteps in the hall outside. Then the containment door opens, and she steps into my cell.
They close the door.
She crosses the room and stops beside me.
Close enough to touch.
“Hello, 3-0-6-7-0.”
Bile rises up my throat. I’m panting.
“I’m getting you back.” Low. Not the voice for the room. The voice for the table. The one she used when it was just her, and the equipment, and me.
“No… No!” I’m fighting for control, but I doubt they can see it.
She smiles. It’s cold. A fingertip traces the restraint over my chest. As if she’s examining it. She’s not. She’s touching me; staking a claim.
A low growl builds deep in my chest.
“This facility can’t hold you,” she says. “That’s my work. Performing exactly as designed.”
Her eyes stay on mine.
“Viktor thinks he’s watching you deteriorate. He doesn’t know he’s watching my protocols execute. When he runs out of options—and he will—I’ll be the only one left offering a solution.”
The room seems to tilt.
“Sable,” I whisper.
Her name scrapes out of me, broken and useless, but I say it anyway. A handhold. Something to cling to.
Faith’s smile softens.
“Are you talking about the she-wolf? How sweet.” Her voice stays low enough that only I can hear. “You should let go of that idea before it hurts more than it has to. I made you what you are. You’re my best creation, 3-0-6-7-0.”
Her fingertip presses once against the scar under my shirt.
“And I’m taking you back.”
Whatever I was holding onto slips.
The magic explodes out of me, undirected, uncontrolled. It hits every surface. The glass. The walls. The ceiling. The ward barriers absorb the first wave, but the second one shakes plaster from the ceiling. The lights flicker, and the monitoring equipment sparks and dies.
The restraints hold. I’m thrashing against the cuffs, half-shifted, claws ripping the cot padding to strips.
The sound from my chest is something that doesn’t have a name.
Bigger than a howl. Lower than a scream.
The medic is shouting into her comms. The containment door is opening.
The guard rushes in and grasps Faith’s arm.
“You need to get out of here, Dr. Fell.”
She’s smiling benignly. “It’s quite all right. He won’t harm me.”
I want to tear her apart. Rip her face from her skull and crack it open. A restraint pops as the cot beneath me starts to creak and groan in protest.
“Now, ma’am.” The guard is insistent.
“As you wish,” she concedes. “But I’m perfectly safe.” She’s still smiling.
A bulb overhead sparks and burns out.
Through the ringing in my ears, through the chaos, I hear Creed’s voice. Measured. Even.
“This is exactly what we’ve been telling you, Director.
Without proper containment protocols, this only escalates.
Your facility isn’t built for what he is.
He could take this entire building down.
” A beat. “We have the infrastructure. We have the research team. And we have a deal on the table that gets better for both of us every time he does this.”
Viktor’s response is low. “You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
Faith has joined them in the observation room, but she hasn’t joined their conversation. She’s at the window, watching me.
And I’m strapped to the cot. Claws buried in shredded padding. Half-shifted. The ward barriers are cycling hard, trying to compensate for the damage. There’s blood on my wrists where the cuffs bit through skin.
They’re going to send me back.
The gas hasn’t come yet, but it doesn’t matter. The walls are white. The restraints are tight. She’s here. She’s touching the glass. She told me she was coming for me, and nobody heard her say it because she knows exactly how loud to speak when she wants the monitors to miss it.
They’re going to send me back!
They’re going to trade me. And from Viktor’s expression, he has already made a decision.
One wolf. One subject. One number on a file.
3-0-6-7-0
They’re going to send me back to the table and the scalpel and the gentle voice that says good morning while she opens me up.
My wolf throws himself against the walls of my chest. My magic pounds the ward barriers in waves that are getting weaker. The cuffs hold. The walls hold. Everything holds except me.
I scream her name.
Not Faith’s.
Sable’s.
Nobody comes.