He grabbed me. After the speech. After the walls. After stay away from me and I am choosing not to do this. He grabbed my wrist and pressed his thumb into my mark and looked at me with those wet blue eyes and said I'm sorry and then walked away again.
I'm furious at him for the rejection and furious at him for breaking it and furious at the bond for ignoring everything both of us wanted and furious at this facility and this body that keeps reaching for people without asking me first.
And underneath the fury — the place where his thumb pressed into my mark is still warm. Still wanting more.
I shove that down. Hard.
Chapter nineteen
Ilose three seconds in the hallway.
I know it's three because I'm counting steps — a habit from juvie, from group homes, from every locked corridor I've ever walked where tracking distance was the difference between knowing where the exit was and not — and between step forty-one and step forty-four, I'm somewhere else.
Not somewhere. Nowhere. A gap. Like someone cut three frames out of a film and spliced the rest together. One second I'm walking behind Sven toward Cal's lab. The next I'm three steps further down the hallway with no memory of taking them and my right hand is clenched so tight my nails have broken the skin of my palm.
I open my hand. Four crescent-shaped cuts. Blood.
I close it before Sven turns around.
"Keep up," he says.
I keep up. My heart is doing something wrong — not fast, not slow. Irregular. Stuttering. Like the engine skipped and caught and skipped again.
Three seconds. Nothing. A blink of lost time.
Except my throat is raw. Abraded, tight, the vocal cords protesting use they don't remember. Like something used my voice during those three seconds that my brain didn't record.
I swallow. It hurts. I don't mention it.
It happens again at lunch.
Tray through the slot. I eat sitting on the bed. Sandwich. Apple. The apple is mealy and tastes like cold storage and I'm chewing it and then I'm not.
I'm standing. At the door. My hand flat against the metal. Pressing.
I don't know how I got here. I was on the bed. Now I'm at the door. The apple is on the floor, one bite taken, and my left hand is against the metal and it's warm where my skin touches it and I'm leaning — pressing my weight forward like I'm trying to push through steel.
I step back. Look at my hand. The three arcs on my wrist are darker. Active. Pulsing with something that feels less like heat and more like intention.
I was going to him. During the gap. Whatever happens when my mind blinks out, the body goes to the same place. Toward the door. Toward mate. Which one? RJ.
I sit back on the bed. Press my palms to my eyes.
This is what the basement felt like from the inside. Not darkness, not sleep. Gaps. The mind going offline while something older takes the wheel.
I'm losing time. In seconds now. What happens when the seconds become minutes?
Afternoon. Sven walks me to Lumi's session. The path across the compound is still icy, and he keeps his hand on my arm.Firm. His grip has changed over the weeks — the first day it was clinical, an escort managing a transfer. Now it's watchful.
We're passing the yard. Red House residents are out — supervised, scattered, doing their version of existing in cold air. Torres is leaning against the building. Another guy is pacing the perimeter. Two more are talking near the generator shed.
One of them looks at me.
Not the scent-reactive flinch I've gotten used to. This is different. His chin lifts. His shoulders square. The look on his face is challenging. Not aggressive. Assessing. Like he's seeing something in me he recognizes and wants to test.
Something rises in my chest.
Not anger. Not fear. Something I don't have a name for. Something that doesn't come from the part of me that grew up in foster homes and learned to survive by reading rooms. This comes from somewhere deeper. It rises fast and hot and my lips pull back from my teeth and the sound that comes out of my throat is —
