2 Tommy
The shove between my shoulder blades sent me through the doorway of Dormitory B at a dead stumble. I turned it into a full theatrical sprawl across the linoleum, arms windmilling, because if a guy’s going to faceplant in front of an armed religious cult, he should at least commit to the bit.
The whole drive in, the compound had looked like a high-end yoga studio had mated with a national park.
Soft-focus signage. Hand-stacked stone walls.
A water feature—an actual water feature—babbling beside the front gate like it was welcoming you to a spa weekend, not a harvesting operation that had been draining people dry for three hundred years.
I’d sat in the back of their transport van breathing through my mouth because even the air had smelled like bad intentions, and I’d thought, they spent real money on this.
That was the thing that stuck. Not the threat of it. The craft of it.
Whoever built this place knew exactly what a person running from their own mind needed to see, and they gave it to them, right down to the hand-lettered sign above the intake arch: You are welcome here.
I’d sat with all three—Wren, Nell, Genny—to hear the parts they could tell to prepare me for this mission, and I was standing inside it, and it looked like a goddamn brochure.
“Okay, see, this is exactly what the Yelp reviews warned me about.” I peeled myself off the floor and dusted my hands on my flannel like the tile had personally insulted me.
“Two stars. ‘Staff hands-on, possibly too hands-on. No minibar. Lighting gives you the ambiance of a tax audit.’ I’d have brought slippers if your brochure mentioned the floor was made of regret. ”
The Warden in the doorway—big guy, neck like a fire hydrant, the kind who’d been told once that intimidation was a personality—curled his lip at me and pulled the door half-shut.
“Sundown orientation. Don’t be late, mouth.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. I love orientation. Free pen?”
The door clicked. His boots squeaked away down the corridor, and I counted them—seven steps to the corner, then a pause, then a turn. Memorized.
The grin stayed welded to my face. Everything under it went quiet and fast.
Two cameras. One bolted high in the corner over the door, one centered on the far wall above the bunks.
The far one swept—lazy, mechanical, a slow arc left to right and back.
Fifteen degrees of dead air on the left edge.
A blind slice you could stand in if you knew it was there.
I knew it was there now. The window was reinforced with hex-fiber mesh sunk into the frame.
Four bunks. Three already claimed by sad lumps of unwashed cotton.
Concrete walls thick enough to swallow a scream and not blink.
Count the exits. Count the breaths. Find the wall that wants to fall. The beast under my ribs had been pacing since the intake bay, a blind, restless thrashing that kept throwing hot static against the back of my teeth.
Don’t. Not yet.
I rubbed the cuff on my wrist. Pale stone over the pulse, hex-thread biting just shy of pain, humming a low frequency I could taste in my back teeth like a battery on the tongue.
It was reading me, that cuff. Every second it sat there it asked my blood a question—active or dormant or nothing?
—and every second Nadia’s magic potion answered for me, dormant, harmless, nothing here but a chatty California boy with a busted radar.
The supreme irony was not lost on me. I was wearing one of their suppression cuffs—the Order’s own tool, the thing they’d locked around Genny’s wrist, around Nell’s, around Wren’s, before they started the suppression drugs—and I was using it as a prop in my cover story.
The weapon that had helped them harvest three of my pack was currently the thing keeping me alive and undercover in their hallway.
I wasn’t sure whether that counted as justice or as the universe’s darkest joke, but I was leaning toward the joke.
The cuff hummed louder.
Nadia had warned me that was a sign—the potion wasn’t supposed to thin like this, not for days, and it was already fraying at the edges like a rope somebody’d dragged across a blade. I knew exactly when it had started.
The intake desk. Her hand under my wrist.
The beast surged inside me, sending a raw wave of heat up my spine until my vision went bright at the corners. It didn’t speak. It just clawed at the cages of my bones, desperate to get back to the corridor we had just left.
Yeah. About that.
I sat down on the edge of the nearest empty bunk before my knees could editorialize, and pressed the heel of my hand against my chest where the heat was trying to pool.
Get it together, hotshot. I’d done many seasons on the crew watching crown fires eat ridgelines whole and never once felt my own pulse try to leave the building.
One frosty bureaucrat slides a cuff onto my wrist and suddenly I’m a teenager at a school dance.
Except it wasn’t right. That was the part that kept snagging.
Levi described his thing with Genny like getting hit by a truck made of light. Santos talked about Nell like the whole world had been out of focus his entire life and then somebody finally cleaned the lens. Brann said finding his mate, Wren, was like being struck by lightning.
Certainty. An undeniable, world-rearranging connection.
What I got at that desk was a live wire wrapped in three feet of insulation.
A pull, sure—a deep, low, gravitational drag toward a woman who ironed her socks and looked at me like I was a math problem she resented.
Attraction so sharp it embarrassed me. A sense of belonging, like I’d walked into a house I’d never seen and known where the coffee mugs lived.
But muffled. Sanded down. We were not mates. She was just someone I found attractive.
I had seven days and a mission to complete. I couldn’t get distracted.
I let the memory roll while my hands worked the frayed cuff seam.
Genny and Levi at the stone table, both of them with their forearms opened, blood running into the channels of the Old Law box like the thing was thirsty.
Two bloodlines, Voss and Marrok, and the box drank both and finally clicked open.
The dark faceted egg inside wouldn’t light for either of them.
Santos closed his big hand around it, and the stone woke up like a struck match, throwing a map open—every dormant wolf the Order had taken, scattered across the country.
And the densest, hottest cluster on that whole map had been a bunch of green dots in the middle of nowhere, branded with the soft, lying word the Order loved best.
Retreat.
Here. This place. More dormants packed into these walls than anywhere else, and more dots crawling toward it on the map like the whole machine was funneling people to one grinder.
So the pack had to send someone in.
Couldn’t be any of the women who’d already worn the Order’s cuffs—they were known faces, processed and tagged, and the three of them were pregnant now besides, bellies just starting to round, and Levi had stood up at that meeting and said over my dead body in the flattest voice I’d ever heard a man use about people he loved.
Couldn’t be Levi himself, or any of the mated hotshots.
The Enforcer radiated alpha like a forge radiates heat, no potion in the world could hide it.
Nadia had stirred something that smelled like burnt rosemary and bad decisions. “Tommy’s the easiest to hide. His wolf runs quiet already. The bloodline’s built for it.”
Built for it. Right.
The thing nobody at that table had said out loud, except Brann, who’d just watched me with those patient sovereign eyes, was that my “grandmother thing,” my joke of a Regional Title, came down to, generation after generation, being the ones who walked into the dark places Brann’s crown couldn’t be seen entering.
Spies. Ghosts. Wolves whose whole gift was not being read. The Midnight Wolves.
So here I was.
The cuff hummed against my pulse, hot now, the masking burning off faster than it had any right to, and the math was suddenly very simple and very ugly. I needed the booster. Now.
I dug two fingers into the seam pocket of my flannel where the vial rode, smaller than my pinky, Nadia’s bitter little reset button. One drop under the tongue, every twelve hours or whenever the cuff started singing, and my wolf went back to sleep.
But the camera over the bunks was sweeping back toward me, and the half-open door meant Hydrant Neck or one of his buddies could be eyeballing the gap, and you don’t get to be the harmless one by getting filmed slipping a mystery potion under your tongue like a guy palming a pill in a prison yard.
I needed three seconds of nobody watching.
That’s when I clocked the kid.
Bottom bunk, far corner, knees up to his chest, face turned to the wall, shoulders going in that small jerky rhythm that means somebody’s crying and trying to do it quietly so the room won’t notice.
Eighteen, maybe nineteen. Cuff too tight on a skinny wrist. The kind of scared that’s gone all the way past loud and out the other side into silent.
The beast under my ribs shifted, the static softening into a low, protective hum.
I crossed the room and dropped down onto the floor beside his bunk with my back against the frame, close enough to be company, far enough not to crowd, and I started talking before he could decide to be afraid of me.
“So okay, here’s the thing, and you didn’t ask, but I’m gonna tell you anyway because I can see you’re new and somebody should warn you about the broth.
” I stretched my legs out. The camera completed its arc and started back the other way, sweeping toward the door, away from us.
“One time, and this is true, I went camping with my buddy Beto up near this ridge with no cell service, no rangers, just us and a cooler and Beto’s catastrophically misplaced confidence in his own outdoorsmanship—”
The kid’s shoulders stilled a fraction. Listening.