"You're putting me in isolation."
"I'm adjusting your containment protocol."
"How long?"
"Until the review is complete."
"That's not an answer."
He pulls the door. Pauses. Looks at me with something I haven't seen from him before — not fear, not calculation. Fatigue. "The yard incident triggered a facility-wide response. Every resident in Red House showed elevated reactivity markers after your proximity event. Every one. That's never happened."
He lets that sit.
"Stay in your room, Alex."
The bolt turns.
Hours. The light moves across the window. Gray to white to gray again.
A tray comes through the slot at noon. Sandwich. Apple. Water. I eat.
Another tray at six. Some kind of stew. I eat that too.
The building settles around me. Doors closing. Footsteps fading. The particular quality of institutional quiet that means lights are going down and staff are thinning and the skeleton crew is taking over.
I lie on the bed. Close my eyes. Try to sleep.
My left wrist won't let me.
It’s been background noise all day — that low, steady hum I've been carrying since the gates. But as the building goes quiet, it gets louder.
And then it spikes.
Sharp. Sudden. A flare that runs from my wrist to my elbow to my shoulder and I sit up in bed because my body thinks something is coming. Not wrong. Not danger. Something my blood recognizes before my brain catches up.
I'm on my feet. Crossing the room. Standing at the door with my hand flat against the metal before I've made a conscious decision to move.
The bolt turns from the outside.
The door opens.
Leo.
The relief hits me so hard my knees almost buckle. He's human. He's whole. He's standing in my doorway on two legs with all his bones in the right places and I didn't realize how scared I'd been until this second, when the fear lets go and what rushes in behind it is warm and sharp and too big for my chest.
He's wearing the red pants and a white undershirt that's too thin — I can see the shape of him through it, the cut of his shoulders, the lean definition of his chest. His feet are bare. Hisclose-cropped hair is damp. His jaw is tight and the smirk is gone, like the shift burned it out of him and what's underneath is rawer than anything he's shown me.
He's okay. He's here. My eyes sting and I blink it away before he can see it.
"How did you get out?" I ask.
He's close. The room is small and he's close and he smells different. Before — before the yard, before the fence — Leo smelled like generic soap. Now there's something underneath. Warmer. Wilder. Like the shift cracked something open in his chemistry and what's leaking out is the thing that was always in there.
My body responds before my brain finishes cataloging it. Heat pooling low in my stomach. Skin prickling. A pull between my hips that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the fact that he's standing three feet from me and I want to close the gap so badly my hands ache with it.
"Are you okay?" I ask. "After —"
"I'm fine."
