"Still scared?" he asks. The smirk is back, small and exhausted.
"Yes," I say. Honestly.
"Me too."
His arm tightens. I let it.
I count his heartbeats. Not to calm down. Because I want to. Because I'm choosing to be here, in this narrow bed at the edge of the world, with the one person who grew up exactly the way I did and found something worth fighting for anyway.
We fall asleep with the cold pressed against the windows, and for one night, I don't think about the lists.
Chapter twenty-one
The alarm sounds at four in the afternoon.
Not the radio crackle or the hallway shout or the controlled urgency of staff managing a routine shift. A siren. Short, sharp, pulsing through the building in three-second bursts. The sound that means something has broken past the protocols.
My left wrist knows before the siren tells me.
RJ's pull detonates. Not the steady warmth I've been carrying. An eruption — pain and urgency and something that feels like a scream pressed into my veins.
I've been spiraling for two days. The blackouts getting longer. The staff argument. The lists of facilities. My emotions have been a raw wound leaking into the bond, and I didn't think about what that meant for the person on the other end. The personwith his hand pressed to a wall, feeling me fall apart through concrete.
RJ felt all of it. Every spike. Every surge.
His body did what it does. The thing it did on Denali when something threatened the pack.
He came.
The hallway erupts. Staff running. Boots on concrete. Sven's voice on the radio — clipped, precise, the cadence of a man executing a protocol he hoped he'd never need.
"Red House containment breach. RJ. Moving through east wing. Full restraint response. All available."
I'm at my door. Bolted. I slam my palm against it and the steel groans.
I don't break it. The bolt slides from the outside. The overnight staff member — face white, hands shaking — is not opening the door to let me out. He's checking rooms. Protocol.
I'm through the gap before he can stop me.
"Hey — hey!"
I'm in the hallway. Running. Bare feet on cold concrete. The alarm pulsing overhead. Staff ahead of me — two, three, converging on the east wing intersection where the sound of something large is hitting walls.
Not hitting. Moving through. I can hear the difference between a body slamming against concrete and a body displacing obstacles in its path. Doors. Frames. The metal squeal of hinges being ripped from mounts. He's not fighting the building. He's dismantling it.
I round the corner.
RJ.
He's bigger than I remember. Not taller — bigger. His shoulders are wider. His arms are thicker. His body is in some state between human and wolf that I haven't seen before — fully upright, fully bipedal, but wrong. The proportions stretched. Hishands are too large for his wrists. His jaw is extended, the bones pushing against skin that hasn't decided what shape it's holding. His eyes are pale fire.
He's looking for me.
Not raging. Not attacking. Every staff member between us is an obstacle he's going through, not a target he's engaging. He shoved one aside — the man is on the floor, dazed, not injured. Another he simply moved, one massive hand against the chest pushing the body out of his path like a door that was in the way.
Three staff between him and me. Sven at the front. Restraint equipment. The long poles with the loop ends that I've seen in the supply closet and never wanted to understand the purpose of.
Sven sees me and his face goes rigid.
