Chapter 24
Sable
The lock clicks at six-fourteen. I know the time because I’ve been counting the minutes since Nadia left.
Two hundred and thirty-one of them. The light through the sealed window has gone from gray to amber to the flat blue-dark of a mountain evening, and I’ve worn a track in the carpet between the bed and the wall.
Nadia stands in the doorway. She’s changed clothes since this morning—different shirt, hair re-tied—but the lines around her eyes are deeper.
“What happened?”
She steps inside. Closes the door. “Viktor gave Dr. Fell access to the containment room.”
My hands go still at my sides.
“Five minutes. Supervised. She spoke to him. By all accounts, barely said a word. Then his magic activated, the monitors spiked, and Viktor cleared the room.”
Nadia pauses, and that pause tells me more than I want to know.
“He panicked, Sable. Not like before. It wasn’t good.”
“Where’s Viktor now?”
“Conference wing. He’s still with the delegation. They’re pushing the offer hard.”
“And Viktor’s listening.”
“That’s his job.”
“Twenty-four lives for one,” I say flatly. “That’s the deal on the table.”
“That’s the deal on the table.”
I look at her. “Would he take it?”
Nadia doesn’t respond right away.
That’s the answer.
“He’s a good man,” she says.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Twenty-four lives, Sable. Wolves and dragon-blooded in Syndicate detention. Families. Children. Viktor has a responsibility to every one of them.” Her voice is steady, careful. “I can’t tell you he won’t do it. I don’t know that he won’t do it. On paper, one life against twenty-four—”
“Don’t.” My throat is tight. “Don’t put him on paper.”
Nadia is quiet. The fluorescent light flattens the room into hard edges. Outside, a vehicle crosses the compound.
Somewhere out there, Viktor Parlance is sitting in a conference room calculating whether one man’s life is worth less than twenty-four.
“I need to talk to him.”
“Viktor’s in a closed session. No interruptions.”
“Then he should have made a better decision before locking the door.”
“Sable.” She puts a hand on my arm. “If you go down there right now, shaking and angry, you’ll give the Syndicate exactly what they need. An emotionally compromised healer making demands. Creed will use that.”
“Creed is already using everything.” I pull my arm back. “Caution got Faith Fell five minutes alone with him. Strategy got him gassed, restrained, and put back on the table in every way that matters.”
Nadia flinches.
“He let that monster into a locked room with my—” I stop.
The word catches in my throat. I can’t say it.
Not here, not to Nadia. Not when Rafael might never hear me say it to him first. “With the man I’ve been keeping alive for weeks.
And now he’s deciding if he’s worth more as a person or as a bargaining chip. ”
“You need to let me—”
“No.” I pull my arm free and grab my jacket off the bed. “Everyone keeps handling this, Nadia. Brenna, Viktor, Aurora, the Syndicate. Every time, Rafael ends up drugged, restrained, traded, or studied.”
“Sable—”
“I’m done sitting in a locked room while other people decide what he’s worth.”
I’m already in the corridor.
The hallway is quieter at this hour. Reduced staff. The overhead lights have dimmed to evening mode. I don’t know the layout well enough to find the conference wing, but I know the direction. Nadia turned left when she went to the meeting, and the administrative level is one floor up.
I take the stairs fast.
Nadia is right. I know that with every step. I’m angry, exhausted, and exactly the kind of evidence Creed would love to use against Rafael.
I keep going anyway.
Because somewhere in this building, Viktor is weighing twenty-four lives against Rafael’s, and I can’t sit in a locked room while other people decide how much of him can be sacrificed before they stop calling it rescue.
I round the corner on the administrative level and nearly walk into them.
Viktor comes first, security officers flanking him. Creed follows with two Syndicate operatives behind him, and at Creed’s left shoulder walks the woman from the stairwell window.
Faith Fell.
She’s tall for a human, but still smaller than I expected.
Shorter than me by a few inches. Pale, composed, beautiful in a clean-edged way that makes the word feel ugly in my mouth.
Every platinum hair is in place. Her suit is immaculate.
She looks like a woman who has never had to raise her voice because people have always leaned closer to hear her.
She looks like the kind of person you’d trust with your medical records.
Monsters should be bigger.
Viktor stops. His face tightens when he sees me. “Healer Marsh. You should be in your quarters.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“This isn’t the time.”
“When is the time? After you’ve signed him over?”
The corridor goes quiet.
Creed’s eyes move to me, and I see the moment he starts measuring me. Not as a person. Not even as an obstacle. As leverage.
“The healer assigned to 3-0-6-7-0’s case?” he says, conversationally.
The number rolls off his tongue like a product code.
“His name is Rafael.”
Something moves on Dr. Fell’s face. Small. A tightening at the corners of her mouth that could be amusement or could be something uglier.
“She named him,” she says to Creed, not to me. “That’s quaint.”
My teeth press together until my jaw aches.
“Healer Marsh is not part of this discussion,” Viktor says. His voice is firm. He wants me gone. He wants me out of sight, where I can’t make his impossible situation harder.
“She’s made herself part of it.” Dr. Fell turns to Viktor, dismissing me without even moving.
A clean shift of attention, and I’m pushed to the edge of a conversation about the man she tortured for years.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s part of the problem.
The variable destabilizing his systems.”
A variable.
She’s talking about me the way she talks about Rafael. A factor in her calculations. A problem to be subtracted.
“You don’t get to talk about him like he’s equipment,” I say. My voice isn’t steady, and I don’t try to make it steady. “He’s not a system. He’s not a subject. He’s a man you strapped to a table while you—”
“While I what?” Dr. Fell faces me. The pale eyes hold mine, and there’s nothing clinical in them now.
There’s something patient and vaguely entertained.
The look of a woman who’s heard this kind of outburst before and already knows how to retaliate.
“While I conducted research that produced results unprecedented in the field of frequency manipulation? While I developed a methodology that could have changed the way we understand shifter biology? You’ve known him for weeks, Healer Marsh.
I built the framework that keeps his body functional. ”
“You cut him open.” The words come out raw. “Don’t you dare dress that up as methodology.”
“I beg to differ,” she says.
“Differ all you want. I’ve seen his scars. I’ve washed them, dressed them, touched the places where someone took their time.” My voice drops. “That wasn’t research. That was sadism. You’re sick!”
The amusement leaves her face. What replaces it is still controlled, still composed, but the edges are tighter. She looks at me the way you’d look at a stain on a clean surface.
“Clinical outcomes involve procedures that laypeople don’t always understand,” she says.
Smooth. Warm. Patient. The voice that explains terrible things as if the horror is in your failure to comprehend them.
“I appreciate your concern for the subject. It’s clear you’ve developed a strong attachment.
But attachment isn’t treatment, and emotion isn’t expertise. ”
“What got a response from him was his name. My voice. Being asked instead of ordered. Being touched without pain following.” I step closer before I can stop myself. “If that destabilized your safeguards, maybe the safeguards were the problem.”
Dr. Fell’s expression barely changes.
“Yes,” she says. “That was the system failure. Your influence destabilized every safeguard I put in place. Before you, he was contained. Manageable. Functioning within parameters. Now he’s breaking walls and injuring staff. That’s on you.”
“He was a prisoner. Manageable isn’t a word you use about a person. It’s a word you use about a dog.”
Her face changes. The composed facade holds, but underneath it, for one second, I see what Rafael must have seen a thousand times from the table: the cold attention of a woman looking at a body and seeing property.
“You’re upset,” she says. “I understand. This is difficult. But the subject’s viability is what matters here, not your feelings about his care.”
Viability.
She uses that word the way a mechanic talks about an engine. Can it still run? Can it be made useful again?
“Viktor.” I turn to him. He’s been watching the exchange with a face like stone. “You can’t give him to her. Please.”
“Healer Marsh—”
“If you want to call it protocol, call it protocol. If Creed wants to call it politics, let him. But if you put Rafael back in a room with that woman, what comes out won’t be a person anymore.”
“Nobody is making any decisions tonight,” Viktor says. His voice leaves no room for argument. “The delegation is here for discussions. Discussions take time. You’ll be escorted back to your quarters.”
“Viktor—”
“Now.” He nods to one of the Aurora security officers. The officer steps toward me.
Dr. Fell watches me being removed from the corridor with an expression I’ll remember for a long time. Satisfaction, clean and quiet, as if the room has finally arranged itself the way she wanted.
Twisted bitch.
“She does care about him,” Dr. Fell says to Viktor as the officer takes my arm. Her voice is warm with something that sounds like generosity. “That’s not nothing. But caring and understanding are different things. I understand what he is. She just loves him.”
The word “loves” in her mouth. Said like a diagnosis. A weakness she’s identified and filed away for later use.
And it’s a word that hasn’t even entered my thoughts yet.
The officer walks me back down the corridor. I don’t fight him. The shaking has gotten worse. If I open my mouth, I’ll say something that can’t be taken back, and Viktor is standing next to a woman who speaks in calm sentences and makes ownership sound like medicine.
Nadia is waiting at the stairwell.
“I’ll take this from here.” She nods at the officer, who slants a look at me, then turns and walks away.
“I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“I had no choice.”
She falls into step beside me. We walk in silence for a full corridor before she speaks.
“What did she say?”
“She thinks he’s a malfunctioning system.
She said I’m the variable that destabilized her design.
She told Viktor that caring about someone isn’t the same as understanding them.
” I hear myself list it out as if I’m giving a patient handover.
Symptom. Cause. Likely progression. “She’s going to get access to him, Nadia.
She’s going to stand in front of Viktor and offer him twenty-four lives and speak in that gentle voice, and he’s going to think about those families in Syndicate detention. She’s going to win.”
Nadia doesn’t tell me I’m wrong. That’s what makes the floor feel suddenly unsteady beneath me.
“I can’t let her take him back.”
“I know.”
“I can’t sit around and wait for a decision. If Viktor trades him—” My voice breaks on the word. I swallow it down. “Nadia, if there’s a chance he’s going to take that deal, I have to get Rafael out before it happens. Not after. Before.”
Nadia walks in silence for several steps. I can see her thinking. Her jaw tight, her eyes straight ahead. She’s not a woman who makes decisions fast. She’s a woman who makes them once.
“There’s a shift change at oh-two-hundred,” she says. Quiet. “The containment level runs a skeleton crew for forty minutes while the night team processes in. The service corridor on sublevel two connects to the medical loading bay. Bay three has a transport van. Keys in the visor.”
My chest empties. Fills again.
“The suppression wards cycle down during shift change,” she goes on. “Ninety-second window before they reset. The restraint buckles are standard medical grade. You’ve worked with them before.”
“I have.”
“I’m not promising anything. I’m not offering to help. I’m telling you what the schedule looks like.” She stops walking. Looks at me. “And I’m telling you I believe you when you say what that woman did wasn’t research.”
I hold her eyes.
“Oh-two-hundred,” I say.
She nods once. Walks away.
I go back to my room, sit on the bed in the dark with my hands between my knees, and count the hours until two a.m.
Seven hours and forty-six minutes.
Seven hours and forty-six minutes until I walk into a cell where a man has been forced to relive everything that made his feral wolf the only way to survive.
I don’t know what I’ll find when I open that door.
I don’t know if the wolf will know me anymore. Not after being locked up with her again.
My hands are steady. Not because the fear is gone. Because the fear doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that the monster who turned Rafael into a weapon wants him back.
She can’t have him.
I sit in the dark, and I don’t sleep.