"Get her back! Get her in her room —"
"Stop."
I don't yell it. The word comes out at normal volume. Conversational. But it carries something — a weight, a pressure, a density that fills the hallway the way a bass note fills a room. It vibrates in the concrete. It vibrates in the air. It vibrates in the chests of every person present, and I feel it leave my throat and I know it's not a human sound.
The same register as the yard. But focused now. Directed. Not involuntary — a command.
Everything stops.
Sven's hand freezes on the restraint pole. The two staff behind him go still. Their bodies responding before their brains can override it.
RJ stops.
He's ten feet away. His chest heaving. His hands — those too-large, between-form hands — hanging at his sides, the fingers flexing. His eyes locked on mine. The panic that was driving himthrough walls is still there, but it's listening. Waiting. Something in him recognized the sound I made and it paused.
I walk forward.
"Alex." Sven's voice. Strained. "Do not."
"Don't."
The word comes out the same way. That register. That weight. Sven's hand drops from the restraint pole. Not a choice. A response.
I walk past him. Past the staff. Into the ten feet of empty space between them and RJ that nobody has been willing to occupy.
RJ's eyes track me. Every step. His body is vibrating — the shift holding, his bones pushing against skin, his jaw extended and his hands wrong and his eyes burning. He's the most dangerous thing in this building and I'm walking toward him like he's the safest place I know.
Because he is.
I stop two feet from him. Look up. He's so much taller in this form. I have to crane my neck.
"Hey," I say. Normal voice. No register. No command. Just me. "I'm here. I'm okay."
His breathing changes. The ragged, heaving rhythm slows. His eyes search my face — not the animal scanning for threat. The man. Looking for proof that the thing he felt through the bond — the fear, the spiraling — isn't killing me.
I lift my hand. Slowly. The way you'd approach something wild. Something that could break you in half but won't because it knows you.
My palm settles on his chest.
The bond flares.
Deep. Massive. The connection between us expanding from a thread to a river, pouring through the point where my skin meets his. Heat floods my arm, my chest, the mark on my wrist blazing gold — not flickering, not shimmering. Steady. Bright.
His body responds. The shift recedes. Slowly — like watching time-lapse of ice melting. His jaw pulls back. His hands shrink. His shoulders narrow. The between-form draining out of him and human form flowing in, not because the staff restrained him or the drugs hit or the protocols worked. Because my hand is on his chest and the bond is doing what containment never could.
Stabilizing him.
His forehead drops to mine. Heavy. The weight of a man who ran through walls to get to me and is now standing with my hand on his heart and the fight draining out of him.
His hand comes up. Finds my left wrist. Wraps around it — gently, so gently, those fingers that just ripped a door off its hinges cradling my wrist like it's made of glass.
He looks down. At the mark. At the gold glow still fading.
And his face changes.
Something older. His eyes go distant. Unfocused.
His thumb traces the mark. His lips part. And the sound that comes out isn't a word — it's the beginning of one. A fragment. A syllable he can't finish, caught between the memory and the present.
