My fingers were numb from the predawn cold and still trembling from everything that had happened in the clearing, and the latch that I’d loosened three days ago with a butter knife from the mess hall decided this was the moment to fight back.
Below me, boots pounded across the courtyard. Radios crackled. Someone shouted an order I couldn’t make out, and floodlights snapped on along the eastern perimeter, throwing long white beams across the compound grounds.
They’d found the empty cell.
I jammed my thumb into the latch mechanism and twisted. Pain shot through my nail bed, but the catch released and the windowslid open six inches. I hooked my fingers over the sill, pulled myself up, and squeezed through the gap.
I’d climbed out of windows before. Different windows, different reasons. Same survival instinct.
My boots hit the bedroom floor. I kicked them off, shoved them under the bed, stripped my jacket and pants in four seconds flat, and pulled the covers up to my chin. My hair smelled of forest floor and Percival’s skin, so I flipped the pillow and pressed my face into the clean side.
Breathe. Slow. Even.
The hallway erupted. Doors slamming, voices overlapping.
A knock. Then another, harder.
I let it knock a third time before I answered. “What?”
The door opened. A guard I recognized from the south gate stood in the frame, hand on his sidearm, face tight.
“Ms. Maxwell. Are you in your room?”
I sat up slowly. Squinted against the hallway light with the convincing disorientation of someone dragged out of sleep. “I’m in my bed. Where else would I be at four in the morning?”
His eyes swept the room. Bed, nightstand, window closed. My boots were under the bed frame, invisible from his angle. My jacket was balled inside the covers beside me, pressed against my hip.
“There’s been a security incident. Stay in your room.”
“What kind of incident?”
“Stay in your room, Ms. Maxwell.”
He pulled the door shut. His footsteps retreated down the hall, joining the growing thunder of boots and voices and radios that filled the compound.
I lay in the dark with my heart slamming against my ribs and Percival’s taste still on my lips and the absolute certainty that Thiago would be at my door by breakfast.
He was.
“Sleep well?” he asked, coffee in hand, eyes measuring.
“Perfectly,” I said.
Neither of us believed the other.
***
The compound got louder after that night.
Thiago added a second perimeter check at midnight, doubled the camera rotation on the eastern approach, and installed motion sensors along the tree line that blinked red in the dark.
All of it because of a single lycan.
Thiago didn’t accuse me directly. That would’ve required admitting his security had been breached, and his ego couldn’t survive the hit. But the surveillance shifted.
A guard walked past my room every forty-five minutes instead of every two hours. My keycard stopped working on the east corridor. And the breakfast interrogations became a daily ritual. Same question, same answer, same mutual disbelief, for two weeks straight.
The holding cells where they’d kept Percy were on the upper sublevel. Interrogation rooms, concrete and steel, the kind of space designed for short-term containment.
