"See, that's what I like about you." He reaches out. His hand finds my jaw—not grabbing, just holding. Fingers pressing into the hinge, tilting my face up. The same grip the shaved-head guard used on my first day, but slower. More deliberate. "All that fight. All thatno." His thumb drags across my lower lip. "Makes the yes so much sweeter."
I jerk my head sideways. His hand follows. Tightens.
"We've got about three hours before anyone checks this wing." His voice drops. Lower. Closer. I can smell him—blackcoffee and stale sweat and something sour underneath. "Your alpha's dead to the world. The cameras on this corridor are on a loop. It's just us."
The second guard unzips the bag. I hear the clink of metal. The snap of something elastic. My brain fills in the gaps before my eyes can confirm and the terror is so complete my vision tunnels.
"If you scream," the first guard says, "we gag you. If you fight—" He glances at his partner. "Well. Fighting's half the fun, honestly."
His hand leaves my jaw. Drops to my collar. Fingers hooking into the neckline of my scrubs. I feel the fabric stretch. Hear the first thread pop.
"Bane." It comes out strangled. High. My mind is moving faster than my voice can keep up with. "Bane, wake up—"
"He's not waking up, sweetheart." The guard tugs the fabric. Another thread pops. Cool air on my collarbone. "We made sure of that. Double dose. He couldn't open his eyes if the building was on fire."
"BANE—"
The guard backhands me. My head snaps sideways and the wall catches the back of my skull. Stars. The pain blooms sharp and bright and for a second the room tilts. I taste copper. My knees buckle.
He catches me by the shirt before I fall. Pins me against the wall with his forearm across my chest. His face is inches from mine—close enough to see the pores, the stubble, the flat nothing in his eyes.
"Last chance to do this the easy—"
A sound.
Low. Subterranean. Not a growl—growls have edges, beginnings and ends. This is something deeper. Something that starts in the floor and rises through the concrete and fills theroom like a pressure change before a storm. The fluorescent tube flickers. The air gets heavy. Dense. Like the oxygen has been replaced by something older.
The guard's head turns.
Bane is standing.
Upright, rigid, his chin lowered, his eyes open and fixed on the guard's hand where it pins me to the wall. His bound hands hang in front of him. His chest rises and falls in a rhythm that isn't drugged. Isn't slow. Deep, measured breaths—the breathing of a predator that's stopped running and started hunting.
"That's—" The second guard steps back. "He shouldn't be standing. The dosage was—"
"Get your hand off him."
Bane's voice. Except it isn't. It's something wearing his voice the way a earthquake wears the ground—the same geography, the same surface, but the thing underneath has changed completely. Lower. Rougher. Resonant in a frequency I feel in my teeth, in my spine, in the base of my skull. A voice that doesn't ask. Doesn't negotiate. A voice that arrives like gravity and expects the world to rearrange itself accordingly.
The guard's forearm presses harder against my chest and my breath catches. But I feel it—the hesitation. The micro-tremor in his muscles. Something ancient and biological screaming at him to obey.
"You can barely stand," the guard says. But his voice has changed. Higher. Tighter. The bravado thinning at the seams.
Bane moves.
He steps forward. One foot, then the other. Precise. Deliberate. The sway from earlier is gone. The glassy confusion, the sluggish movements, the lolling head—gone. Burned off. Incinerated by whatever is happening inside him right now,whatever biological override just kicked the sedatives out of his bloodstream like a body rejecting a transplant.
His scent changes.
I smell it—the moment it shifts. The warm amber and sandalwood that I've been breathing for two days is still there, but underneath it something new is surfacing. Something metallic. Electric. Like ozone before lightning. Like the air above a transformer. It fills the cell in seconds, pushing out every other smell—the bleach, the concrete, the guards' stale sweat. Replacing it with something that makes every hair on my body stand up.
Something that smells like the exact opposite of safe.
Bane looks bigger. I know that's not possible—he's the same six-two, the same broad shoulders, the same body that held me on this mattress twelve hours ago. But the way he holds himself has changed. Expanded. Like every muscle has engaged at once and the space he takes up in the room has doubled. His shoulders are squared. His spine is a iron rod. His head is lowered slightly—chin tucked, eyes up, the posture of something that was designed to kill and has spent twenty-four years pretending it wasn't.
Thisis what Ellis was suppressing.Thisis what the sedatives were for. Not to keep Bane calm. To keep this thing inside him caged.
The cage is open.
