We stay like that. His face in my hair and my arms around him and the pull between us running warm and quiet and present. I breathe him in. The wanting that has been running loud since the lab, since the fence, since the first time I saw him — it's quiet now.
Then I hear the footsteps. Coming back down the corridor. Radios crackling. Staff returning.
I pull back.
His eyes track me.
He won't want to see them handle me. I know this without being told. He's still cuffed to a wall and if staff redirect me away from him while he's watching and can't do anything about it, the thing that just softened will not stay soft.
"I'm going," I say.
He nods. Once. The barest movement.
"I'll come back to the fence," I say.
Something eases in his face. The smallest thing. Enough.
I go.
The corridor is full of staff coming back from the yard. Dalton is among them and his eyes find mine immediately — reading, assessing. I walk past all of them and don't look back and feel RJ's gaze on me through the wall for the length of the corridor.
Chapter thirteen
I'm in the common room. Late afternoon, the dead hour between programming and dinner. I'm at the table near the window with Cal's new coursework open in front of me. Jim is in the chair by the door. Leo is somewhere being Leo. Sven is in the doorway — present, ambient, watching everything without appearing to.
RJ is across the room.
He's been coming to the common room more. A centimeter at a time, the slow expansion of what he can tolerate. Today he's standing near the far wall, not sitting, not talking to anyone. I've been aware of him the way I'm always aware of him — the low constant pull of wanting something that isn't mine yet, the monitoring I can't turn off. It's been steadier today than it's been in weeks.
Dalton comes in.
He's doing his job. His eyes find me across the space and he adjusts his path slightly, moving toward me the way he does when he has something to pass along.
He steps into RJ's line of sight.
The change is immediate and total.
RJ's whole body shifts — not a flinch, something older than a flinch, the full-body reconfiguration of an animal that has just had its sight line to something important blocked. His eyes fix on Dalton's back. The pull between us doesn't just spike — it changes quality entirely, from something I can navigate to something I can't, and then he shifts and the wolf is in the room before I'm on my feet.
He goes for Dalton.
Sven is between them before I've processed it — moving toward the threat instead of away, the way Sven always moves, because that's what Sven does with his body and his job and his courage. The wolf hits him instead. All of it — the full weight and momentum of a feral wolf going for a target — catches Sven mid-stride and takes him off his feet and the sound his head makes hitting the floor is the worst sound in the room and then it isn't because RJ is still moving, still going for Dalton, and Sven isn't getting up.
"RJ—"
I'm moving. The table goes sideways. Someone screams — a resident, near the wall — and I hear Gavin's voice somewhere behind me on a radio and people scrambling for the exits and RJ has Dalton against the far wall now, wolf form, enormous, the growl filling every corner of the room.
Dalton is not panicking. I clock this in the half-second I have — he's got his back to the wall, hands up, not fighting, talking low in the tone of a man who has handled dangerous things before and knows that sudden movements are how people die.
RJ lunges.
I get between them.
***
The impact takes me off my feet. Not claws — the sheer force of him, shoulder into my chest, and I hit the floor hard enough that the air goes out of me completely and I'm looking at the ceiling for a second that lasts too long, ribs screaming, trying to remember how to breathe.
Above me, RJ stops.
