2 Tommy #2
“—and Beto, my guy Beto, he decides he’s gonna catch us dinner. With his hands. From a creek. Like a bear. And I said Beto, you have a four-hundred-dollar fishing rod in the truck, and he looks me dead in the eye and says, ‘Tommy, a real man doesn’t need tools.’”
A wet, startled hiccup of a laugh out of the kid. There. Got him.
The camera reached the door, its little servo whining, the lens pointed dead away from me. The Warden in the corridor gap was watching the kid laugh, his attention sliding off the annoying chatterbox doing his annoying chatterbox thing.
Three seconds.
My hand was already at my collar like I was scratching an itch. Thumb and forefinger pinched the vial out of the seam, snapped the wax seal against my thumbnail, and I tipped my head back into the story—
“So naturally Beto falls in, fully clothed, in front of a family of actual raccoons who I swear applauded.”
—and the drop hit under my tongue, bitter as a penny soaked in pine tar, and the vial vanished back into the seam.
The hum in the cuff dropped. The wolf sank under like a stone in a pond, and the burning at my wrist eased.
The kid was almost smiling. “Did he catch anything?”
“He caught a cold, and a profound spiritual lesson.” I knocked my knuckles against his bunk frame, gentle. “What’s your name?”
“Eli.”
“Eli. Good name. Biblical. Very on-brand for the venue.” I tipped my head toward the door. “Listen. You stick near me at dinner, okay? I’m a professional at being annoying enough that nobody looks too hard at the people next to me. It’s a gift. Grandma always said so.”
He nodded, scrubbing his face with his sleeve, and for one second the wolf in me sat down, content, like a job had been done.
Then the Warden’s voice cracked through the door. “Orientation. Move.”
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The fasting meal was a war crime against a metabolism like mine.
I stared at the bowl they slid in front of me—broth, gray, with the haunted memory of a vegetable somewhere in its past—and felt my whole engine block start knocking.
I run hot.
Active wolf, wildland firefighter, a body built to burn six thousand calories on a bad day and beg for more. They gave me eight ounces of warm regret and called it grace.
“This is incredible,” I told Eli, who’d glued himself to my elbow in the chow line exactly like I’d told him to.
My wolf took in how we were the only two male attendees in the room.
That made us rare. Maybe too important. I could feel all the eyes on us.
“This is the lightest I’ve ever felt. I can see through time. ”
I tapped the spoon against the bowl rim, fast, a drumline my body was demanding I keep up just to bleed off the static, and used the motion to scan.
Long cafeteria, low ceiling, the lavender stink they pumped everywhere fighting a losing war with the smell of two hundred frightened people in one room.
I wondered, not for the first time, who held the lavender supply contract.
It was everywhere—the corridors, the orientation packets, probably the linens.
Somebody had done a study. Somebody had sat in a room and said, what scent reads most as care?
and then they’d pumped it through the vents of a facility where they were running blood-draw procedures in the basement and called it a healing environment.
If I ever found that study, I was going to frame it and put it on the wall as a monument to what people were capable of when they had theology and a budget.
Wardens posted at the main door we’d come through and at the far corners.
But my eyes kept sliding to the back wall.
Beyond the food service line, past a locked security gate, a narrow, dimly lit corridor stretched into the dark.
A heavy steel door stood at the end of it—not just a door, a full vault seal, braced with iron and runic wards that looked like they hadn’t been painted, but burned into the metal.
It was guarded by two Wardens who had the flat, dead eyes of killers.
But it wasn’t the guards that made the beast under my ribs whine. It was what lay behind that vault door.
Even through Nadia’s masking potion, my Midnight wolf senses picked it up. A low, thrumming vibration in the air.
It was a quiet, restricted corridor. The kind of place where people walked in and didn’t walk back out, and whatever was hoarded inside that vault was the reason why.
Two junior Stewards paused near the edge of the serving line, their heads bowed together. Their voices were pitched low, meant to be swallowed by the acoustic panels, but a Midnight wolf’s hearing is built to catch what people try to hide.
“Did you see the supply requisition?” the first one whispered, her hands wringing the edge of her tunic. “High Alchemist Joss is already here.”
“Joss?” The second Steward flinched, physically stepping back. Her voice dropped to a reverent breath. “Are you sure? He hasn’t come up from the deep labs in a month. They say the blue light is weeping out of him so fast now he burns through three sets of robes a day. What is he building?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”
The beast under my ribs gave a low, warning growl. The name Joss sat in the air like a drop of poison in a glass of water.
“You’re not eating,” Eli said.
“I’m savoring.” I pushed the bowl at him. “Here. You’re nineteen, you’re basically a furnace. I had a big lunch.”
I hadn’t. The lie sat fine. He took it.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The lecture hall was set up like a church that hated joy.
Rows of hard benches, a podium up front, and acoustic panels lining the walls. I slid into the back row, slumped low, one knee bouncing, the picture of a kid in detention who’d already decided the teacher wasn’t worth the effort.
It was good cover. It was also the only seat in the room where I could watch every other seat in the room.
I scanned the staff stationed along the walls.
They weren’t all like Miller. Near the side exit, Sloane stood in her enforcer uniform, her athletic frame still but alert, pale eyes moving methodically across the crowd.
She wasn’t holding a baton. She was just watching.
Further down, Marisol was gently guiding a crying woman to a bench, while Kyle and Livia stood near the doors, their expressions soft with actual compassion as they handed out small cups of water.
The staff here had a network. They looked out for these people. They looked out for each other.
And that was the second layer of the thing, the one that was harder to sit with.
The Millers—the ones who knew—were only the tip.
Most of these people in this building were the day program.
The real, benign-face part of the operation: the Marisols, the Livias, the Kyles who handed out cups of water and meant it.
They were the part of the wellness retreat that was actually a wellness retreat, the part that had reviews online with four-point-seven stars and one complaint about the parking.
And they were how the whole machine stayed covered—not just from human authorities but from the Conclave, from anyone sniffing around the edges.
Because if you sent an investigator in here, they’d find three genuinely caring staff members for every predator, and the predators would point at the caring ones and say see, look what we built here, look at the healing we do.
The operation was self-camouflaging. It grew its own alibi and gave it a name badge and good intentions.
The pack knew that some of the Conclave’s upper tier was bought.
And someone had to be buying the aurum latens, right?
A lot of someones. That’s what I kept coming back to in the quiet hours: the buyers.
Every vial of what the Tenders drew from these people in the lower wing had a customer at the end of the chain.
Paranormals willing to pay for longevity, or for borrowed senses, or for whatever theological purpose the Verdant Order told them they were purchasing.
Then she walked in, and my heart did the truck thing all over again.
Kaia. Steward Thorne. She came up the side of the room and took the podium like she owned the floor.
Her dark hair was pulled back into a severe, punishing bun, but the austere style only exposed the striking, elegant lines of her neck and jaw.
The Order had dressed her in a shapeless, heavy gray tunic designed to hide the body, but as she moved, the stiff linen couldn’t entirely conceal the lush, natural curves of her hips and breasts underneath.
Her spine was drawn so straight it looked like it hurt, hands folding flat against the wood, right over left, even pressure.
Chin level. And when she looked out over the crowd, the fluorescent lights caught a startling, suppressed ring of gold burning deep in the center of her irises.
Her voice, when it came out, was smooth and cool as river stone. “Good evening. You’ve each completed intake. You’re tired. The disturbances that brought you here may already feel quieter, thanks to your cuffs. Tonight we begin to teach you why.”
She spoke of the “noise in the blood” as if it were a disease. She recited the Order’s dogma with a passionate conviction, explaining that the welcome cuffs and the suppression tonics were acts of mercy—sacraments designed to keep us safe from the “beast” that wanted to destroy our humanity.
I listened to her, the sheer scale of the lies making my jaw ache.
She genuinely believed it. She believed that locking a wolf in a steel cage of chemicals was the only way to save a soul from becoming a monster.
Yet even as the brainwashing poured from her lips, I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
She was beautiful in her absolute, tragic certainty, her presence pulling at my chest like a physical weight.
But her hands weren’t steady.