Sven doesn't answer. We pass doors and he stops at mine. Opens it.
A voice from down the hall. Casual. Almost amused.
"Figured it out yet, Dorothy?"
Leo. Leaning against the wall outside his own door. Arms crossed. That smirk. But his eyes are serious — watching me theway you watch someone who just got hit by a car and hasn't looked down yet.
"Not Kansas, is it?" he says.
Sven's hand tightens on my arm. "Inside. Now."
I step into my room. Turn around.
The door closes. The bolt turns.
I stand in the middle of the room for a long time.
My hands are shaking. My breath won't steady. A boy turned into a wolf. A man in chains looked at me like I was the answer to a question he'd forgotten how to ask. And my body said yes before my brain could say run.
I sit on the bed. Press my back to the wall.
From somewhere in the building — distant, muffled by doors and concrete and distance — a howl. Low and long.
Chapter five
The therapy building is separate from Red House.
Sven walks me outside to get to it — across the yard, past the enclosed fence line, toward a smaller structure set back near the tree line.
From out here I can see the full layout of the compound. Three main buildings, spread in a loose triangle. Red House behind me — dark, squat, reinforced. A second building to the east that's bigger, modern-looking, with more windows. That must be Orange or Gold. The third looks like a large lodge. And then the smaller structures: a storage shed, something that might be a generator building, and the one we're walking toward.
Between the buildings, the enclosed yard — the one with the double fencing. Empty. No one pacing. I notice the absence and immediately resent myself for noticing.
The therapy building is single-story. Wood, not metal. It has actual curtains in the windows. Someone put a welcome mat at the door of a building.
Sven opens the door. Doesn't come in. Positions himself outside like a man who's done this handoff before and doesn't love it.
"Thirty minutes," he says. To me or to whoever's inside. Both.
The room is warm. Not Red House warm, which is the baseline temperature of a building that's trying not to freeze pipes. Actually warm. There's a couch — soft, not bolted. A chair across from it. A low table between them with a glass of water and a candle that's been lit, the flame small and steady. The walls are painted a color that isn't gray. Some kind of soft green. There are books on a shelf. A plant in the corner that's somehow alive in Alaska in winter and it smells incredible in here. It’s a light fragrance, but I want to bottle it up.
It's the most normal room I've been in since I got here. Which means it's the most suspicious.
The woman standing by the window turns when I walk in.
She's young. Not much older than me. She's wearing a sweater that looks like it was chosen for comfort rather than authority, and her face has the kind of openness that immediately makes me want to check for the angle. Nobody in a facility looks at you like that without wanting something.
"Alex," she says. My name, not Alexandra. "I'm Lumi. Before you sit down — I'm not a therapist. I have a history of working with feral residents, and I'm good at it. I'm going to ask you questions. You're going to have space to ask me questions. Once a week. This isn't therapy. Relax and be open."
She says it the way you'd explain the rules of a card game.
"Sit wherever you'd like."
Two options. Couch or chair. The couch is softer and farther from the door. The chair is harder and closer to the exit.
I take the couch. Not because I trust her. Because I want to see what she does when I don't pick the defensive option.
What she does is sit in the chair across from me, tuck one leg underneath her, and wait.
