"And me?"
"Your alpha presence and the new intake’s reaction is diagnostic information." He says it the way he says things that are clinically true and also something else. "Gavin's words."
I think about the pull that started the morning I shifted — the way the bonds announced themselves before I had language for them. The way my body knows things before I do.
"Okay," I say.
We go through the admin building entrance and down the corridor I've only been through a handful of times, toward the gate holding area at the far end.
***
Cal is already at the observation window when we arrive.
He's standing with his hands in his coat pockets. Stone is beside him — present, unhurried, reading the room the way Stone reads everything. Gavin is to the right with his file.
They all look at me when I stop at the window.
I look through it.
He's sitting at the table with his hands loose in front of him, not tapping, not restless. He catalogued the space. Now he's waiting.
Quiet. That's the first word. Not RJ's quiet — RJ holds his silence the way you hold a door shut against pressure, the constant maintenance of it, the effort it takes. This man's quiet is just calm.
He looks up.
Finds the window.
Finds me through it, specifically — not the glass, not the general direction of the observation area. Me. His eyes settle on mine through the one-way glass and something in his face goes very still and very careful, the expression of someone who has registered something significant and is deciding what to do with it.
The pull is there immediately.
Low. Slow. Nothing like Dalton's switch-flip or Jake's rough insistence. Something that moves the way water moves — finding the path of least resistance, patient, already knowing where it's going to end up. I press my thumb against my wrist and feel it and say nothing.
"Alex." Gavin's voice, quiet. "What are you feeling?"
I glance at him. He has his pen out. Of course he does.
"A pull," I say. "Bond indicator. New. Slow." I look back through the glass. "He doesn’t seem feral."
"No," Cal says. Cal was on that mountain. Cal spent years there. When he talks about what someone who has been down from it looks like he's not reading from a textbook. He's reading from himself.
"Can you tell if he was up there?" I ask. "Specifically. On Denali."
Cal is quiet for a moment. His eyes stay on the man through the glass. A pause. "Yes. I think so, but I would only know his wolf."
Stone hasn't spoken. I look at him.
His jaw is set and his eyes are on the man through the glass and something is moving in his face that I can't read completely. Recognition, maybe.
This man through the glass has it too.
Gavin makes a note.
"He came himself," I say. "That’s a new way to get more inmates.”
"It means he has enough volition to make a choice," Gavin says carefully. "What it indicates beyond that—"
"It means he chose this." I look at Gavin. "Whatever this is. He didn't wait to be found. He walked up to a gate and asked to come in." I look back through the window.
