The terror is enormous. It sits on my chest like a living thing, pressing down, compressing my lungs. Because the fog is gone, and I can see exactly where I am with perfect, brutal clarity, and there is no heat to hide inside, no biological override to blur the edges, and through the walls someone is still crying and someone is still singing a lullaby and the person who was screaming has gone silent in a way that makes my skin crawl.
I am in a cell.
Someone put me here.
And the last clear thing I remember before the needle is hands closing around my arms in a parking lot, the smell of chemical sweat, and someone sayingeasy, easyin a voice so bored it made my blood freeze.
Whatever they injected me with killed the heat dead. Pharmaceutical-grade heat blockers—way beyond the street-level suppressants I was hoping to score.
These people know my biology better than I do.
Which means they've done this before. Many times. To many people. Some of whom are behind these walls right now, and some of whom are gone, and the blanket at the foot of my mattress belongs to someone in one of those two categories.
Breathe.
Count something.
Count breaths.
One. Two. Three—
The lock buzzes. I flinch so hard the bed frame shudders beneath me.
Two men enter. Not doctors. Guards. Big—the kind of big that fills a doorframe, that makes an eight-by-ten cell feel like a coffin. Black tactical gear. No insignia. No names. The one in front has a shaved head and hands the size of dinner plates. The one behind carries a metal tray—syringes, vials, a blood pressure cuff.
My teeth chatter as pure terror and adrenaline flood my system.
"Sit up."
It's not a request. The voice is flat, mechanical, a sound that expects compliance the way gravity expects things to fall. I start to roll to the side to push up my sluggish body.
I don't move fast enough.
The shaved-head guard crosses the cell in one stride, grabs the front of my shirt, and hauls me upright. My spine hits the wall when he slams me onto my ass. Stars. The back of my skull cracks against concrete and my vision whites out for a second, pain blooming bright and sharp from the base of my skull to my teeth.
"When we say sit up," he says, face inches from mine, "you sit up."
He lets go. I slump against the wall, blinking, head ringing. A warm trickle at the back of my scalp. Not much. Enough to feel.
The second guard sets the tray on the mattress beside me. Behind him, a woman in blue scrubs steps in—mid-forties, dark hair pulled tight, latex gloves. She moves between the guards like they're furniture. Doesn't acknowledge the blood in my hair. Doesn't acknowledge me at all beyond what's required.
She takes my blood pressure. Straps the cuff over the zip ties—she's done this with restrained patients before. Shines a penlight in my eyes. Draws blood—two vials, neat and quick, the needle in and out with barely a sting. She's good at this. Fast and mechanical and utterly detached.
"When did your last heat cycle begin?"
I don't answer. My head is still ringing from the wall.
"Any history of bonding?"
Nothing.
"Current medications? Suppressant type and dosage?"
Silence. The shaved-head guard shifts his weight. A warning.
The woman caps the second vial. Labels it with a number—not a name. A number. She writes it on the vial, on her clipboard, on a small adhesive tag.
"It doesn't matter," she says, packing her tray. "The bloodwork tells us everything."
