And nobody else is reacting.
That's the part that undoes me worse than the wolf did.
The other guys — the ones who pressed into couches and repositioned toward walls — are settling back. One exhales long and slow, like he just sat through turbulence on a flight. Another glances at the air hockey table like he's annoyed.
Nobody screamed. Nobody ran. Nobody said what the fuck or oh my God or any of the things you're supposed to say when biology just shredded itself on the floor.
They've seen this before.
It's Tuesday for them.
RJ hasn't looked at the door. Hasn't looked at the wolf. Hasn't looked at the blood on the floor near the air hockey table.
Just me.
Even now — with my brain screaming and my hands shaking and a wolf locked in a room ten feet away — he's still watching me. And the look on his face isn't shock or fear or aggression. It's something worse.
Focus. Like I'm the only clear thing in a world that's been static for a long time.
Sven is back and reaching for my arm to pull me off the couch.
The sound that comes out of RJ is so low I feel it in my molars before I hear it. Not human. Not a sound a human throat makes. A vibration that starts in his chest and pushes through his teeth and it is a warning.
Sven stops.
For exactly one second, the man who has run every room I've seen him in with absolute authority — stops.
The other guys feel it. Heads turn. Bodies go still. Whatever that sound means in whatever language this is, they understood it.
I didn't understand it. But my body did. My pulse spiked. My skin flushed. And something in me answered — not with fear, not with logic, but with a recognition I have no explanation for.
I'm sitting on a couch in a facility I don't understand, and my body's loudest signal isn't fear. It's want. For a man who just made the same sound as the thing behind that locked door.
Sven recovers. Gets his hand on my arm. Pulls me up hard enough that my shoulder wrenches.
"Walk."
I walk. Because if I stay one more second I'll look at him again, and every time I look at him my body does something I can't control.
I look back anyway.
He's leaning into the chain. Still. Cuffs biting his wrists. Hair in his eyes. And through it — that pale, bright stare. Still on me.
Still on me.
Sven pulls me around the corner and he's gone.
The hallway. Fluorescent lights. My boots on the floor. My pulse everywhere.
"What the fuck was that." Not a question. A demand.
Sven keeps walking.
"That kid — Torres — he just — he —" The words won't organize. How do you say he turned into a wolf to someone who was in the room and doesn't seem to think that's remarkable? "Where am I? What is this?"
"Keep walking."
"He turned into a wolf."
