Just a man in a cell.
They hand me gray standard-issue clothes. Prison uniform. I dress without comment.
“Move.”
We walk deeper into the detention center, past occupied cells. I can hear breathing, movement, the sounds of other prisoners existing in their cages. The guard stops at a door marked 3-7.
Biometric scan. The lock disengages with a heavy click.
“Inside.”
I walk in. The door closes behind me. Locks engage. Multiple mechanisms. I hear them all.
Then: silence.
The cell is exactly what I expected. Ten feet by twelve. Concrete walls reinforced with steel. Suppression field generator mounted in the ceiling, pulsing with a steady rhythm that I can feel against my skin. No windows. One fluorescent light recessedbehind protective grating. Concrete sleeping platform with a thin mattress. Metal toilet. Small sink. Nothing else.
Home for the foreseeable future.
Or the last place I’ll see before execution.
I sit on the edge of the platform. The mattress is standard issue—barely thick enough to qualify as padding. I’ve slept on worse.
The suppression field weighs on me. Not unbearable but constant. A pressure that reminds me with every breath that I’m contained, controlled, powerless.
My dragon is buried so deep I can barely sense him. Just a distant awareness of fire I can’t access.
The situation is straightforward: Maximum security cell. Full suppression. No contact with the outside. No timeline for release or interrogation. Council meeting in seventy-two hours to decide my fate.
Three possible outcomes. They might grant sanctuary. They might execute me for decades of service to the Syndicate. They might imprison me indefinitely while they verify my intelligence.
I knew the risks when I defected. Knew Aurora might not trust me. Knew my past would make sanctuary difficult, even with valuable intelligence to trade.
What I didn’t know was Nadia.
Where did Viktor take her? What’s happening to her right now? Is she being interrogated about the last forty-eight hours? About what Viktor walked in on?
Even buried beneath suppression, my dragon stirs, recognition pulling at something deeper than conscious thought. The field can suppress my fire, but it can’t erase what my dragon knows.
Mine.
She’s mine.
The timing is catastrophic. She came to kill me. And now we’re—what? Bonded? Caught in something neither of us chose and neither of us knows how to navigate?
If I survive the Council’s judgment, I still have to survive that.
Time passes. No way to track it without windows or clocks. Could be an hour. Could be three. The suppression field makes everything feel slower, heavier.
I lie back on the mattress. Stare at the ceiling. Calculate probabilities.
Execution: forty percent. My crimes are extensive. Decades of Syndicate service. Operations that killed Aurora operatives. Orders I gave that destroyed lives. They have every justification to end me.
Indefinite imprisonment: thirty percent. Keep me alive for intelligence value, but never release me. Use me until I’m no longer useful, then dispose of me quietly.
Conditional sanctuary: thirty percent. Grant protection in exchange for full intelligence cooperation. Restricted movement. Constant surveillance. Never fully trusted but alive.
All three end with me in a cage of some kind.
