I stand. My legs feel distant and heavy. Dalton's hand moves to my back.
We leave the pages with Lumi. It's done now.
Chapter fifteen
Alex
The room is the same.
I don't know why I expected different. Same long table, same five chairs behind it, same single chair in the center of the floor with nothing to put your hands on. Windowless. The furniture of a system that has been deciding things about me since I was fourteen years old and hasn't changed its arrangement once.
I sit.
Tomlinson is in the center. Dark hair, blazer over a sweater, hands folded on the table. He looks at me the way he looked at me the first time — not assessing, not judging. To his left the woman with the tablet and the sharp suit already has her stylus moving. She didn't introduce herself at my first panel. She doesn't introduce herself now. Her eyes move over me and then move to the folder in front of her. To Tomlinson's right, the largeman in black cargo pants — one of Lumi's mates, he works in security, Mr. Len Cole.
Gavin at the far end. Not centered. Present but not presiding. My file open in front of him.
Behind me along the wall — Cal, Stone, Lumi. Sven by the door.
And at the side of the room, standing rather than seated, Kane and Kade. Lumi introduced them to me in the hall.
Dalton is beside me.
Tomlinson opens it the same way he opened my first panel — measured, unhurried.
"We're here to review new information submitted ahead of this session," he says. "Specifically regarding the James case and Alex's continued placement." He looks at Lumi. "You requested time to present."
Lumi stands.
She walks to the front — small and steady, the room reorganizing around her without her asking it to. She sets the pages on the table in front of Tomlinson. He looks down at them.
"This is a witnessed and documented memory statement," she says. "Signed by Alex and by me. Completed last night." She holds Tomlinson's gaze. "Alex has recovered the memory of the night Curtis James died. All of it. This statement contains her full account, in her words, in the order it occurred."
The woman's stylus stops moving.
"At the time of her intake evaluation and at every panel review since," Lumi says, "Alex stated she had no memory of that night. That was true. First-shift trauma in a fourteen-year-old can seal a memory completely — the mind protects itself the only way it knows how. The memory has been intact. It was not accessible." A pause. "It is now."
Tomlinson picks up the pages. Reads. He passes them left. The woman reads. Passes them to the large man. Len. Then toGavin, who already read them this morning and whose face gives nothing away as he turns the pages again.
The room is silent while they read.
I look at the wall. I put my hands flat on my thighs and feel Dalton beside me and the bond running steady between us and I breathe.
Tomlinson sets the pages down.
"The statement confirms that Alex was responsible for the death of Curtis James," he says.
"Yes," Lumi says.
"She's confirming it," the woman says. Not a question. Not alarmed. Efficient.
"She's confirming what was suspected," Lumi says. "She's also confirming the context in which it occurred. A fourteen-year-old girl, alone in a basement, with a seventeen year old male who had followed her there and put his hand on her throat." Her voice is even. "Her body did the only thing an alpha body can do in that situation. She had no control over the shift. She had no memory of it afterward. She has been carrying an open question mark in her file for years for an act of self-defense she couldn't explain because her mind sealed the memory to survive it."
Tomlinson looks at Kane and Kade.
"You have findings to present," he says.
Kane steps forward. Kade beside him.
