The water inside was cloudy and purple-tinged.
The guards flanked Warden Harker and me. Their radios murmured low. They moved like soldiers, scanning every shadow, hands hovering near the batons at their belts. I'd counted six checkpoints so far, and these two had been with us since the third.
Off in the distance, I heard the soft mechanical hum of security systems buried behind the walls—the click of cameras adjusting, the distant groan of reinforced doors opening and locking shut again.
Despite the lighting, the place felt buried.
Subterranean.
Like we were walking deeper into the Earth.
Classical music drifted faintly through unseen speakers, too elegant for the setting.
And the neon purple—hearts, slogans, paint glowing against gray concrete—only made the darkness underneath feel sharper.
As we walked, the purple hearts kept snagging my attention.
I'd loved The Matrix growing up. Blue pill, red pill—the choice between comfortable, mindless obedience and painful, awakening truth.
Purple was both.
Awake but trapped.
Seeing the truth, yet being unable to escape the cage.
Control and hunger.
That made my stomach tighten in ways I didn't want to examine.
"Dr. Lark?" Harker's voice cut through the white noise of my thoughts. "Are you listening?"
"Sorry." I tore my gaze from a heart splattered with a substance brown and flaking.
Old blood?
Or paint?
In this place, did it matter?
I cleared my throat. "You were explaining about the protocol."
He sighed like I was wasting his time. Harker was a thick-necked beta with the disposition of a man who peaked in high school and never recovered. He'd been running Blackmoor Psychiatric Facility for eleven years, and in all that time, no Omega had set foot in Block D.
Until me.
"The protocol," Harker repeated slowly, "is that you don't touch the glass. You don't accept anything passed through the meal slot. You don't engage with any inmate other than the one you're here to see."
“Understood.”
His eyes went to my throat, to the place where my scent glands sat dormant beneath my dark brown skin. "You're sure your suppressants are current?"
"Yes. It’s been twelve years without a heat cycle, Warden." I kept my voice clinical. Professional. The voice I used on talk shows and at academic conferences, the one that made me famous for writing a book about Rook without ever meeting him. "I'm medically classified as non-presenting. I couldn't trigger an Alpha if I tried."
Harker grunted. He didn't believe me. He didn't have to—my records spoke for themselves, stamped and sealed by every regulatory body that mattered.
Suppressants weren't just pills. They were a lifestyle. A slow, chemical erasure of everything my Omega biology wanted me to be.
No heats.
