I leaned against the cold observation glass, my breath fogging a small circle as Lab 7’s sterile white lights glared below. My team moved like specters around Subject 23—strapped to a reinforced table this time, after what happened with 19.
“Administer Protocol Kappa,” I said into the intercom, my voice flat.
Dr. Chen’s gloved hands trembled as she pressed the injector to 23’s neck. The subject, a wiry ex-Marine named Coleson—jolted against restraints as neon-blue serum flooded his veins.Good. Pain meant his cells weren’t rejecting it outright.
Monitors screamed to life.
“Cardiac output doubling.”
“Adrenaline off the charts.”
“Muscle mass increasing—”
Coleson roared, tendons writhing like cables beneath sudden slabs of muscle. The steel cuffs snapped like twigs. My pulse quickened as he staggered upright, heaving the 500-kilogram bench press rack overhead like it was Styrofoam. Laughter bubbled in my throat—after nine months of corpses and combustions—
Then, his head snapped toward the observation deck.
Blood streaked from his nostrils first, black and viscous. His eyes met mine—pupils blown wide, sclera webbed with ruptured capillaries—as he hurled the weight straight at us. Safety glass spider-webbed under impact; scientists dove under consoles as shards rained down on me like diamond hail.
“Get out,”I barked into my comm, as Chen was uselessly pounding the lockdown button she’d already overridden. The subject lunged for her, eyes black-dilated and spittle flying. She backpedaled, tripping over a toppled crash cart as he loomed. Seven feet of engineered muscle twitched under synthetic adrenaline. His hand closed around her throat.
Then he froze.
A wet, guttural gasp echoed through the lab speakers. The subject’s grip slackened; Chen scrambled free as he crumpled like a puppet cut from its strings. The cardiac monitor flatlined into a single merciless tone.
Silence pooled in the observation deck. I realized I’d stopped breathing.
“V-fib induced,” came a clipped voice from behind me, Ellis, sounding almost bored. “As requested.”
Requested. My jaw clenched. They’d waited until his bio-data crossed the fail-safe threshold. Let Chen dangle in those final seconds because regulations demanded certainty.
Below, she knelt beside the corpse, fingers pressed to its still-warm neck as if she could will back a pulse she’d fought so hard to stop minutes earlier. Her hands shook.
So did mine.
The alarms kept blaring long after the system crashed. I stared at the screens, now flickering with error codes, my hands numb on the keyboard. We’d beenright there. A three-second delay in the stabilizers—three goddamn seconds—and the entire sequence unraveled like cheap thread. Jenna slammed her fist against the console behind me, cursing in that sharp, clipped way she does when she’s trying not to yell. For once, I didn’t blame her.
I replayed it in my head: Vargas shouting coordinates over comms, Johnson’s hands shaking as he rerouted power cells, the readouts glowing green-green-green until everything flared red. We’d followed protocol to the letter. Done everything by the book this time. And still—still, it wasn’t enough.
“We underestimated the variables,” I muttered later in debriefing, pacing the dimmed lab as the others glared at holograms of failed equations like they owed us answers. “The feedback loop—it wasn’t just about timing sensitivity. We need redundancies inside redundancies.” I paused while I swallowed bile, thinking of how violently close we’d come before it burned out: 89% convergence rate glimmering for half a heartbeat before it disintegrated our sample core into stardust and ash.
Kiran leaned back in his chair, arms crossed tight over his chest like he was holding himself together. “So what? Another layer of safeguards? Double-check every output manually?”
“If that’s what it takes,” I said flatly. “Or we scrap phase three entirely and rebuild from waveform algebra instead of particle models.”
They groaned in unison—another month down, another untested rabbit hole—but nobody fought me on it this time. Not after tonight’s spectacular clusterfuck of wasted data and near-meltdown protocols humming under our feet like a threat even now.
Later, alone in my quarters with synthetic coffee and metrics spiraling behind my eyelids every time I blinked, I forced myself to think past frustration’s iron chokehold.So close. Close enough that when I closed my eyes, I still saw that flicker of almost-success—a jagged crack in some unreachable door we hadn’t even known existed two weeks ago.But almost doesn’t stabilize reactors or move investors, Lila had snapped earlier today before storming out. Today, it almost got people killed.
She wasn’t wrong. We’ll fix this; I swore silently. Or next time we won’t walk away with just scorched pride. Until now, we’d been using 100 percent shifter DNA to synthesize the serum. I knew Juliet was going to be the key. She’s a hybrid, both human and shifter. My mind raced. Until I could get my hands on Juliet, I needed someone like her. I knew what I had to do. I picked up my phone.
“Dane. I’ve got a job I can trust only you to do.”
Chapter 13
Bronc
The griddle hissed like a cornered snake when the batter hit for the first pancake, butter screaming into smoke. I counted twelve bubbles forming before flipping, military precision surviving another night of her teeth in my shoulder. Through the lace curtain’s bullet-hole patterns, morning light caught the raised skin around Juliet’s fresh claiming mark. The bite on her shoulder, a molten ridge of demarcation warning every male that she belongs to me.
