"It means you don't leave. Ever. You're classified as non-viable and you're housed in long-term containment and you live there until —" He shrugs. The shrug is too casual for what he's saying. "Until."
RJ. In his run. Chained in common rooms. Pacing a fence line. A man who can barely speak being documented and evaluated and held in a facility that has already decided what he is.
The empty run on the other side of the divider is an absence I feel like a missing heartbeat.
"RJ." I say.
"Will they just… keep him? Indefinitely?"
"The Panel reviews him every cycle. And every cycle I’m sure they mark him the same way: non-verbal, non-compliant, elevated aggression index." He pauses. "That was before you got here. Now they've got a whole new set of problems. RJ reacting to a female resident. RJ flexing containment barriers."
"Alex, you triggered my shift. You made RJ break behavioral baseline. You've got a scent signature that destabilizes every resident within a hundred feet." He nods at my wrist. "That's an emergency classification review."
The warmth between us is doing something. Not the detonation of the fence or the urgency of last night. Something slower. A pull that lives in the six inches of cold air between his arm and mine. I want to close the gap. I want to press my shoulder into his and feel the connection lock into place the way he described. Socket and plug. There.
I don't. Stone is watching.
"The murder file," I say. "Gavin showed me the forensics. The bite marks don't match standard wolf. There was a third blood sample. None of it makes sense."
Leo walks in silence for a few strides. Processing. The old Leo would've cracked a joke. This one lets the weight of it sit.
"If it wasn't you," he says slowly, "you were there for a reason."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean you were fourteen and latent and in a basement with something that could do what those bite marks show. You didn't end up there by accident. Something drew you down there, or something drew it to you." He looks at me sideways. "Sound familiar?"
The fence. My body moving without deciding. Pulled toward RJ by something in my blood that overrode every rational objection.
Yes. It sounds familiar.
"You think I was drawn to whatever was in that basement."
"I think your body does things before your brain catches up. I've got personal experience with that." He flexes his hand — the one that grabbed my wrist, the one that shifted. "Whatever happened that night, your body was responding to something."
The basement. Four years ago. The idea makes my stomach turn and my wrist burn simultaneously, which is a combination I'm getting tired of.
We're on the north side of the yard. The chain-link divider is visible. RJ's run is empty — they've changed his schedule, or they're keeping him inside.
Leo sees me looking.
"They pulled his outdoor privileges after the containment breach," he says. "Indefinite."
Because of me. Because I bent a door frame and found him in the dark.
"Alex." Leo stops walking. Turns to face me. Brown eyes that are warmer than they were before the shift, with something amber living behind them that surfaces when his emotions run high. "I'm telling you this because nobody else will. Gavin documents. Sven enforces. Lumi gives you one word at a time. Cal cares, but caring doesn't move the Panel. None of them are going to tell you the thing that matters."
"Which is?"
"They don't promote problems. They re-home them." His voice drops. "And right now, you're the biggest problem this facility has ever had. You, me, and RJ — we're not a treatment plan. We're a containment failure. And when the Panel sits down with our files in two weeks, they're not going to ask how to help us. They're going to ask how to separate us."
The wind picks up. Cold, biting, carrying pine and metal. My hair whips across my face.
"They can't," I say. And I don't know if I mean logistically or because the bond won't let them or because I won't let them. All three, maybe.
"They can." Leo's jaw tightens.
He starts walking again. I fall in beside him.
