The sublevels were worse than the screaming had suggested.
Growling. Whimpering. A low, constant moan from the cell at the far end that hadn’t stopped since I’d stepped off the elevator.
I’d suspected since the first night.
The screaming through the floors, the triple-reinforced doors, the way Thiago’s eyes went flat when I asked about storage. Suspicion was one thing. Confirming it with my own eyes was a different kind of horror.
I swiped the keycard. The first door opened.
The lycan inside was conscious.
Male, mid-thirties in appearance, though with lycans that could mean centuries. He sat on a metal bench bolted to the wall. His eyes tracked me as I entered, and recognition moved across his face.
Not of me specifically. Of what I carried. His nostrils flared and his pupils dilated and the sound that came out of his throat was a low keen of grief.
He could smell the bond. The pregnancy. Both.
“I’m documenting everything,” I said quietly. “I’m going to get you out.”
He didn’t respond. Just watched me with eyes that held too much understanding for a man in chains.
I moved through the cells.
The device I’d smuggled from the medical wing, a small tablet Wyatt had helped me swipe during a training session, capturedimages of each cell, each restraint, each subject file pinned to the door.
The coherent ones watched me pass. The feral ones threw themselves at the doors, snarling. Their eyes were wrong, blank. Pupil-blown, animal, stripped of the intelligence that separated a lycan from a wolf.
These were the Purifier subjects. The successful ones, according to the files.
The “cured” ones were in the last row. I made it through two cells before I had to stop and press my back against the wall and breathe.
They were empty. Not feral, not aggressive, not anything. They sat or stood or lay on the floor with no expression and no recognition and no response to stimulus. The files called them “fully processed.”.
My hand moved to my stomach without thinking.
The corridor stretched ahead. At the far end, past the cells, a door markedRESEARCH ARCHIVES.My keycard worked on this one too.
The room beyond was part lab, part library. Shelves of files, equipment I didn’t recognize, and a workstation that held decades of documentation. I moved through the stacks, scanning labels, looking for the name I’d come here to find.
An alarm shrieked through the compound.
I froze. The sound was distant, coming from the upper levels, followed by the thunder of boots moving fast. Guards mobilizing toward the eastern perimeter. Through the reinforced walls, I caught the faint pop of gunfire and shouts that carried the particular urgency of a breach.
I didn’t know what was happening out there. Sometimes the alarm goes off that way. A patrol encounter or an animal incursion. But the timing was convenient enough that I didn’t question it. Instead, I moved faster through the stacks.
The skeleton crew left on the sublevels paid me no attention. My keycard gave me legitimacy. Just the boss’s daughter, doing research. Nothing to report.
At the back of the third shelf, behind rows of bound experiment logs, my fingers found a different binding. Leather, not plastic. Soft from years of handling.
Initials pressed into the leather in faded gold.
S.M. Sienna Maxwell.
I pulled it from the shelf. The leather was warm in my hands, and the weight of it was wrong for a research document. Too personal, too worn from years of being carried and opened.
A journal. With handwriting that looped and pressed hard into the paper, the penmanship of a woman who wrote fast because her thoughts outpaced her hand.
I opened the first page.
