The wolf doesn't think. The wolf knows the room — scent and sound and pressure, the smell of hot adrenaline and underneath it the sour edge of fear, the noise of too many agitated bodies and the register of wolves who have stopped being people. The wolf orients toward all of it.
I don't lunge. I don't move toward anyone.
I growl.
Not the loudest sound in the room. The one underneath all the other sounds — the register that hits something older than language in every wolf present. I feel it move through the space. I feel the room change around it.
The noise stops.
I hold it.
Then I shift back.
***
When I come back to myself the dining hall is silent.
Torres is standing three feet from a Gold House resident with his hands open at his sides, chest heaving, eyes going from amber back to brown. Two wolves near the windows are still, the slightly dazed expression of people who went somewhere they didn't choose and have just returned. A chair is on its side. Someone's tray is on the floor. The staff members who camethrough the far door are frozen just inside it, tasers out, taking in the room.
Everyone is looking at me.
I step down from the table — table, bench, floor — and sit down and pick up my fork.
I eat.
***
It takes about thirty seconds for the room to follow. One by one, like something reversing — trays righted, chairs scraped back into place, the sound of silverware starting up again, careful, testing. A space finding its way back to functional after something has moved through it.
I finish my eggs.
Leo and Gray are both standing directly behind me. Neither of them says anything. They're close enough that I can feel the heat off them, both bonds running loud and present, the alpha-protection response that fired when the room went sideways and hasn't fully stood down. They're shoulder to shoulder and completely unnecessary and I would tell them that but I'm eating.
I reach back without looking and pat one of them on the arm. Whoever it is catches my hand for one second — just holds it, just that — and then lets go.
Leo's voice comes from behind my left ear. Low. Quiet. Meant for Gray, not for me.
"Our Dorothy's lethal."
A beat. Then Gray's voice, lower. Rougher.
"And she's ours."
I don't turn. I don't react. I register it and file it somewhere I'll come back to later and take another bite of toast.
Across the room Torres is sitting back down. His coffee is cold. His hands are still not quite steady. He picks it up anyway and drinks it and looks at the table and nowhere else. That's whatrecovery looks like sometimes. You drink your cold coffee and you stay in the room.
I push my tray back when I'm done and stand up.
Gavin is in the doorway.
He's looking at me. His expression is the one he gets when something has happened that falls outside his existing frameworks and he's already two steps into deciding what to do about it.
"Jones. My office. Now."
***
His office has absorbed a lot of difficult conversations. He stands behind his desk with his file open and the jaw clenched.
