2 Tommy #3
The fingers of her right hand, folded so perfectly over her left, had a fine tremor running through them, a current under still water. Twice in ninety seconds, she lifted two fingers to the pulse point under her jaw, her face tightening slightly. Something was wrong with her composure.
The beast under my ribs thrashed against Nadia’s potion, a blind, hot pressure that wanted to knock the podium over and pull her down into the dark.
I forced myself to stay in my slouch. We watch. We do not move.
“We will now transition to our evening reflection,” Kaia said, her voice carrying over the silent rows. “Break into groups of four or five. A Steward will guide you through sharing your path to sanctuary.”
The room broke into a low hum of shuffling feet and creaking benches. Kyle and Livia immediately began organizing the front rows, while Marisol took a group near the windows.
A shadow fell over my bench.
Kaia stood there, her tablet pressed against her ribs. Her chin was level, but her eyes locked onto mine with a sharp, guarded intensity.
“Thomas,” she said. “You and Eli will join station six. With me.”
“Tommy,” I corrected, sliding off the bench with a lazy grin. “And lead the way, Steward. I’m great in small groups. Very collaborative.”
She led us to a quiet corner of the hall, where two other potential dormant women joined us.
We sat in a circle of wooden chairs. The air between us was immediately thick with the scent of lavender oil, but beneath it, fighting through the chemical reek, was the true smell of her.
Rain on hot slate. Wild honey and dark, rich earth.
It was warm and green and storm-rinsed. And only my wolf seemed to be catching it.
Kaia sat with her hands folded over her knees. “We will begin with our reasons for seeking sanctuary,” she said, her voice doctrinally perfect but her fingers twitching slightly against her uniform. “Lydia, please share.”
The first woman spoke of hearing voices, of the terror of her own strength before finding this place.
Kaia listened, her expression softening with a compassion that wasn’t in the manual.
She spoke to the woman gently, validating her fear but steering the narrative back to the Order’s safety, reassuring her that the quiet of the cuff was her true home.
It was a beautiful, terrible performance. She was saving this woman’s sanity while reinforcing her prison.
And here was the thing that really sat on my chest like a dead weight I couldn’t shift: she was good at it.
If I didn’t know—if I was just a busted dormant from Bakersfield who’d hit the end of his rope and found a brochure, if I hadn’t sat with Genny while she told me what a suppression draw actually felt like from inside, if I hadn’t seen the map light up with all those green dots packed into this compound like seeds in a grinder—I would be buying it.
I’d be sitting here with these two quiet women nodding along to every word, feeling the cuff hum and thinking, yes, this is mercy, this is the noise going quiet, this is safety.
The public face was so complete, so crafted, three hundred years of refinement in every gesture, that the lie didn’t even feel like a lie while inside it.
As long as the buyers kept buying, the Conclave kept looking the other way, and new dots kept crawling toward that green cluster on the map, this woman would keep shepherding people toward the machine she’d been raised to believe was a sanctuary, and she’d never know what she was doing.
Unless I found a way to stop it all.
“Tommy,” Kaia’s voice snapped my attention back. Her eyes met mine, and I saw the microscopic slip in her throat—a quick swallow. “Your turn. Why did you leave California?”
“Honestly?” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, letting the lazy grin do the heavy lifting. “I was just looking for a place where nobody asks me to do my own laundry. And the brochure promised excellent hiking. Though I have to say, the gray broth is really testing my commitment to the retreat.”
The two dormant women let out small, nervous giggles. Eli smiled.
Kaia’s shoulders tightened, her voice dropping a register as she lost her liturgical polish for a split second. “Sanctuary is not a joke, Thomas. The noise in your blood will destroy you if you do not take it seriously.”
“I take it very seriously,” I said, dropping the smile just enough to let her see the truth underneath. “I just prefer to laugh at things before they try to cage me.”
Our eyes held. For three long heartbeats, the lecture hall receded. I could see the fine sweat at her hairline, the slight tremor in her hands as she gripped her tablet, her whole body coiled like a wire under tension. She was fighting something she couldn’t name.
Kaia stood up abruptly, her voice regaining its steel edge. “We are done for the evening. Return to your dormitories. The Wardens will conduct evening roll call.”
She turned and walked quickly toward the main doors, her posture rigid, her feet carrying her away with speed.
I sat back in my chair, the grin slowly dying on my face.
The beast under my ribs gave one last, restless whine before sinking back into the static.
I watched her go, realizing that the woman who could be holding the key to this whole facility was wrapped in a labyrinth of lies she would die to protect.
And I was going to have to find a way to break her out of it.