Behind me Jim is quiet. Down the wall Dalton is quiet. At the far end Sven is the same. We are just people doing the same thing: being here. Not asking for anything. Not needing anything back.
***
I fall asleep against the wall at some point.
I don't plan to. One moment I'm looking at the door and the next I'm coming back from somewhere else, the corridor dim around me, the window at the far end showing the specific grey of evening rather than afternoon.
There's a blanket over my shoulders.
I wasn't cold before. I didn't notice getting cold. Someone noticed for me.
RJ's door is still closed. Dalton is still ten feet down the wall — eyes closed, or nearly, his head back against the plaster, the notepad closed on the floor beside him. Jake is gone. Jim is gone.
The blanket is warm. It smells like the facility linen, which is not a good smell, but it's here and it's warm and someone put it there.
I don't know who.
I decide it doesn't matter.
I pull it tighter and close my eyes and feel the wanting running steady through my wrist like something that has found its rhythm and is going to keep it.
I'm still here.
That's enough for tonight.
Chapter seventeen
The next morning, I'm three bites into breakfast when Gray growls.
It's low. Involuntary. The bond carrying what I'd already clocked — the Gold House resident's eyes on me, the new calculation, the reassessment that's been running since the reclassification, since the board language started circulating, since a female alpha became a documented fact. This one isn't hostile. It's something more unsettling than hostile — the regard of someone deciding what category to put me in now that the old one doesn't fit.
Gray doesn't like me being looked at like that.
I'm already turning to find him across the room when Torres shifts.
The dining hall has been wrong since I walked in.
Today is the wrong of a room that's been holding something for too long and is running out of capacity to hold it. The lockdown has a texture now — I can feel it in the way people are eating, heads down, elbows close, the posture of people who have decided that taking up less space is the safest option. The Gold House table is performing calm with the focused intensity of people who know the performance is all they have.
That's the room Torres shifts into, sudden, the feral edge that's been running hot for two weeks finding the crack it needed. The growl hits him like a current finding a gap. His eyes go amber and his chair scrapes back and the sound he makes isn't language anymore.
The wolf beside Gray lunges.
It happens fast the way these things always happen fast — one moment and then everything at once. Torres going for the Gold House resident who looked at me, his chair hitting the floor behind him. Two wolves near the windows coming to their feet when Torres moves, the instinct firing before the brain — a challenge in the room means a challenge in the room and wolves don't let challenges go. Someone's tray goes wide. Chairs and bodies and the low sounds wolves make when the human part stops running the show — the dining hall fills with all of it in about three seconds flat.
A fourth scuffle starts near the staff door. I don't see how it begins. It doesn't matter how it begins.
Staff are moving but they're already behind it. Protocol says don't escalate — protocol was written for incidents that build slowly and this didn't build slowly. This went from Gray's growl to four separate scuffles in about eight seconds and there is no version of protocol that covers the dining hall going fully sideways on a Tuesday morning. A radio crackles —all available staff to the dining hall, repeat, all available— and the door at the far end bangs open as someone responds.
Leo is on his feet. Gray is on his feet. Both of them moving toward me — they don't need to, I'm not the one in danger, but the bonds have fired and they're not thinking about that right now. Gray has put himself between me and the nearest scuffle with the economy of someone who has done this before. Leo is close, present, the bond running loud.
I step up onto the bench.
Then onto the table.
I shift.
***
