And now RJ is in a cage across the compound and I'm in a room with a made bed and a shelf of books and the distance between us is measured in categories. Gold and Red. Success and failure.
The distance is a lie. Every morning when I make my bed with those precise corners, I'm performing a version of myself that is real and also not the whole truth. The wolf is in me. RJ is in me — not bonded, not mated, but pack, written into my muscle memory by winters and starvation that nothing in Gold House can overwrite.
And now she's here. And the bond is pulling me toward her. And RJ is bonded to her too — I can feel it, can feel the secondconnection through some channel I don't understand, a pack awareness that tells me his pull and mine are aimed at the same center.
If I go to her, I go back to the animal.
If I stay, the animal eats me from the inside.
Tiny finds me at midnight.
The Gold House advisor moves the way his name doesn't suggest — silent, vast, filling the doorway with a calm that is its own kind of authority. He doesn't knock. He opens the door and stands there and waits.
I'm sitting on the edge of my bed. Hands gripping the mattress.
"Can't sleep," Tiny says. Not a question.
"I'm fine."
Tiny walks in. Sits in the desk chair. It creaks under him. He folds his hands — enormous hands that I've seen restraining residents with a gentleness that shouldn't be possible at that size — and he waits.
Tiny is good at waiting. He doesn't pressure and he doesn't push and he doesn't fill silence with questions. He just occupies the room with a presence that says I'm not leaving and whenever you're ready.
"The new intake," I say. Not looking up. "Red House."
"The girl."
"She's — I'm —" I stop. My jaw works. The words are hard. Not because I can't find them — I have excellent vocabulary, speak in complete nuanced sentences. The words are hard because they're true and true words cost more than clever ones.
"I can feel her," I say. "All the time. Through the walls. Through the buildings. It doesn't stop. I can't make it stop."
Tiny nods. Slow. No surprise.
"Can you stay away?" he asks.
"I told her to."
"That's not what I asked."
I look up. His face is calm. Massive and patient.
"I don't know," I say. And the admission costs me something. My shoulders drop. My posture — the careful, maintained architecture of recovery — curves. I feel it happen and I can't stop it. For the first time since Gold House, I feel defeated like the wolf on the mountain again.
"If I can't," I say. "If the bond —" I swallow. "I’ll lose control. They'll demote me. Revert my classification. The reintegration review. The timeline. Everything."
"Possibly."
"I'll end up back in Red. Back in containment. Back —" My voice breaks. A crack in the foundation. "Like RJ."
The name hangs in the room.
"You're not RJ," Tiny says. Quiet. Certain.
"How do you know?"
"Because RJ never sat on the edge of a bed and asked for help. He paced. He growled. He broke things." Tiny leans forward. "You're sitting here telling me you can feel her through walls. That's not regression. That's a man who's scared enough to say so."
I stare at the floor. The tremors are worse now. Not just my hands. My whole frame vibrating like a structure resonating at a frequency it wasn't built for.
