“The transformative nature of our new drug is worth a brief time away from home, I assure you. No lasting damage.” I paused for emphasis, pacing my words and my steps to give me time to steady myself. To enjoy the scene despite her controlled performance. “I’ll have my assistant collect another sample.”
“Then you’ll be free to gloat somewhere else?” she asked. Her expression stayed as chilly as her voice, but I could see the muscles of her face clench as I made my way to the door.
“If it’s any consolation,” I said as I pulled the door open, “you won’t be locked up much longer. Think of this as your spa day. Before you know it, you’ll have the benefits of your very own miracle serum. And more life to enjoy it than you ever dreamedpossible.” I sounded like a crazy cult leader. I sounded convincing enough to be one.
Room D-4. Make sure everything is pristine. Samples are the most important we’ve gotten yet.
A text popped back before I could put the phone away.No problem. We’ll make sure they are 100% clean.
I did a mental check of the remaining variables, clicking them off one by one. Renda, secure. Sample, imminent. Juliet likely steps away from being in my grasp.
We were set and ready to go. The observation room was a place that demanded composure. The bare surfaces of it. The sterile silence of it. But composure wasn’t what I felt when Dane mentioned Juliet. When the absence of her became its own presence. I wanted to slam my fist through one of the glass panels. I wanted to throw Dane’s taunt back in his face. Instead, I stood next to him in front of the glass, looking into the lab room as Chen readied everything.
“IfJuliet comes to you,” Dane said, not moving his eyes from the glass, “isshegoing to be a problem?” Nodding toward the doctor. Dr. Lila Chen wasn’t only the lead doctor on this project. She was also my distraction. The cunt I’d used to get my dick wet in those moments when I needed relief. Hell, Dane joined us on more than one occasion.
His voice was casual, like he had any fucking idea of my obsession with Juliet Bettencourt. I stared at him as if he were the subject on the table, watching for the flicker of a muscle as I tried to read the full intention behind his question. Juliet was mine. Mine to fuck. To punish. To claim.
I took a deep breath. The glass seemed to close in around me, my own reflection crowding me on every surface. I let it out as laughter, low and menacing.
“If she knows what’s good for her, she’ll pretend she’s never seen my dick.”
“Alright, Dr. Chen,” I said, more than a suggestion. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Through the glass, I watched Chen position the needle at the IV line in the volunteer’s arm. I watched Subject 23-B, Andrew Olson relax himself in the chair. The back of it was reclined. He was leaning back like a man who had no reason to fear his own transformation. The dark stubble on his chin was as rough as his posture was calm. I could almost believe he knew what he was in for.
“This is the one,” I said. “The right formula. The right subject.” I turned off the mic. “This better fucking work.”
My voice was colder than the surface of the glass. Colder than the pale linoleum beneath my restless feet. I shouldn’t have felt that sort of rage. Restless, the need to move, the need to touch. I shouldn’t have felt the pressure building where my jeans tightened. That was a problem. And I wasn’t about to let a problem impede my plans, not this close to the finish line.
Dr. Chen met my eye through the panel, gave a stiff nod, then pushed the plunger down. I watched the plunger empty its charge and send the compound through the needle into the line. I watched Olson tense as his pulse rate climbed and his temperature spiked. This was the closest we had come, the final round after more failures than any man would know what to do with. But I was not any man. Chen exited the room. We’d learned our lesson last time.
The monitors blared their steady rhythms as I stared through the observation glass, knuckles whitening around my clipboard. My breath fogged the reinforced pane when I leaned closer—mesmerized. Subject #23-B’s veins pulsed cobalt beneath hisskin as if lit from within by bioluminescent ink. His restraints creaked when he arched off the medical table, tendons snapping taut like bridge cables.
“Heart rate 180 BPM,” I muttered into my headset recorder, though my thoughts raced faster. Renda’s serum is catalyzing structural mutations in real time. The air tasted metallic with ozone and adrenaline—his or mine, I couldn’t tell.
A guttural snarl tore from #23-B’s throat as his biceps rippled, fabric shredding beneath sudden knots of muscle. Bone cracked like popcorn kernels—his fingers elongated into obsidian claws that left gashes in steel cuffs when he flexed them free.
“Phase two.” My voice trembled as I punched codes into the intercom. “Inflict test laceration.”
The robotic arm descended behind the glass, blade glinting cold under surgical lights. A shallow cut bloomed across #23-B’s forearm… then vanished as we watched—skin weaving itself whole in under three seconds.
Accelerated regeneration confirmed. I scribbled frantically despite my shaking hand until the clipboard cracked under grip strength I didn’t know I had.
He moved next—a blur of reconstructed sinew and feral grace. He was still a human male. But better. I could tell by the look on his face it was panic and not rage that contorted his features. He still reached up and smashed CCTV cameras before I registered him leaving frame. Static fizzed across half my screens.
“Son of a—”
The emergency exit alarm whooped as dented metal groaned overhead. I barely yanked my head back before five black claws punched through the observation glass like rifle rounds—stopped inches from my face by its armored polymer core.
Through spider-webbed cracks, #23-B’s eyes locked onto mine: feral gold eclipsing human irises entirely now… but no fur erupted beneath his torn scrubs. No full shift triggered byrage or agony. Only vestigial weapons ripped from halfway down evolution’s road.
“Partial manifestation matches Bettencourt gene markers,” I whispered into my recorder even as primal fear iced my spine—even as part of me wanted to applaud. His new teeth gleamed like bone shards when he grinned at me through blood-flecked lips… and for one fractured second before sedation gas hissed into his lungs they retracted…
I saw him. After he passed out and was carried to his cell, I knew we’d done it. I also knew that in a matter of weeks, when Juliet came to me, oh and she sure as fuckwouldcome to me, she would have more than a man holding her. She onlythoughtI was a monster before.
Chapter 23
Juliet
