Jake looks up from across the lab. He read it in me the same moment I felt it — the ability to register when somethingis building before it breaks. His jaw tightens slightly and then releases and he looks back at the table.
Jim has looked up too. He's watching me with the not-looking-away quality, reading whatever is on my face.
Cal is at the back counter. He doesn't look up. But his pen, I notice, has stopped moving.
Nobody says anything.
The pull between me and RJ is louder than it was this morning. Still not the bond — never quite the bond, always this other thing, the pull my alpha nature tracks without my permission. But louder. Like something in him is closer to the surface.
I breathe. Pick up my pen. Write the next answer.
The lab continues.
Dalton appears at the door twenty minutes later. He checks in with Cal the way he checks in with everyone — brief, professional. They exchange something about assessment timelines. Cal answers without looking up from what he's writing. Dalton's eyes move across the room — Jake, Jim, Leo, me — the sweep of a man keeping track of variables.
He nods once and leaves.
Jim watches him go. Not the brief flicker I've seen before — this is longer. More deliberate. Jim's gaze stays on the door for a moment after Dalton has cleared it, something working behind his eyes that I can't read all the way to the bottom of.
Then he turns back to Cal.
"The security consultant," he says. "How long has he been here?"
Cal looks up. "Since just after Ms. Jones's panel review. Why?"
Jim is quiet. "No reason," he says. And goes back to the reflection portion of his survey.
Cal looks at me briefly. I look back. We don't say anything. Cal's pen starts moving again and I close my folder and Leomakes one final objection about the coursework that Cal doesn't acknowledge and the session ends.
The walk back takes me past the common room.
I feel him before I see him. The pull sharpens as I get closer to the door — louder, more insistent, my alpha nature locking onto him the way it always does, the wanting running hot before I've made any decision about it. I slow down. Stop at the doorway.
RJ is at the far wall. Cuffed. Hands behind him, the chain fixed to the anchor point at waist height, standing because there's no way to sit. His head comes up when I appear in the doorway.
We look at each other across the room.
Behind me in the corridor a radio crackles — a voice, then another, something about the yard. Running feet. The staff member who was stationed outside the common room moves past me at a jog, already talking into his radio.Fight. Need backup outside.
The corridor empties.
I step inside.
***
He doesn't look away as I approach. His eyes track me the way they always track me — like I'm the only fixed point in whatever space he's in — and the pull between us runs louder with every step. By the time I'm three feet away it's a sound I can feel in my back teeth.
I stop in front of him.
Up close he fills the space differently than he does at a fence. There's no chain link between us. I can see the line of his jaw, the tension held in his throat, the way his chest rises and falls. His long hair falls into his face. His shoulders are forced back by the cuffs and his hands are behind him and every line of him is straining toward me.
"Hey," I say.
His chest moves. Once.
"Alex." His voice is low and rough and my name in his mouth is everything I need right now.
I look at his wrists. The cuffs. The chain at waist height behind him. I look at his face.
