The question is to the room. The brand at my wrist. The brand at my throat. The bond at my sternum. The forming threads. The hollow.
Thaw answers before anyone else.
"Yes."
"How do you know?"
"Because the Syndicate cannot make a bond. The Syndicate can pair us. The Syndicate can put us in a room with you. The Syndicate cannot make my body do what it has been doing since the cell. The bond is the part of this they did not get to engineer. The bond is what their program could not control. That is how you saved us. That is also why they want you."
I sit with it.
"What do they want me for after, after the stabilization, after the babies?"
Dean is quiet for a moment.
"That is the part the folder does not tell us. The breeding is on the page. The stabilization is on the page. What they planned to do with you once they had a stable bonded female who could handle four ferals — that is not listed here."
I look at the men in the room. I am the answer to a problem they could not solve any other way, and what they wanted me to keep solving for them is a question Dean has not been able to answer yet.
The kitchen is quiet.
Chapter twelve
Jen
I find it in the mirror.
The cabin has one — small, fogged, the silver flaking at the edges, the kind of mirror somebody hung above the bathroom sink forty years ago and forgot. I am in here because after the folder I needed a door between me and the kitchen. The pack let me have it. Crull is in the hallway with his palm flat against the wood on his side and the brand at my wrist warm with it.
I splash water on my face.
I look up.
It is the first time in weeks I have seen my own face in glass, and the woman in it is mine and also not — thinner at the cheekbones, brands at my throat and wrist where there used to be nothing.
I lower my eyes from my face to my chest. The sweatshirt collar is wide enough that when I pull it down I can see the place between my collarbones where the mark had been.
It was a red, warm spot. The size of a flattened palm. Not a rash, not really — the skin was never broken, never flaking, never raised. Just a clean unmistakable warmth under the surface. It is the reason I went to the doctor in February. It is the reason my blood went into a lab. It is the reason a Syndicate reader picked the panel up off a national network and put my name on a list.
It is the start of all of it.
And it has moved.
The skin between my collarbones is smooth now. No warmth. No red.
But under the skin — in the same boundary, the same oval, the same size — there is a shape.
Dark. Not bruise-dark. Ink-dark. I can see it through the translucence of my own skin like a watermark held to a window.
I press my palm to the skin over it. It pulses against me. Once. A heartbeat that is not my heartbeat. A startled sound escapes me. The brand at my wrist throbs. Crull, on the other side of the door, has felt my pulse change. I do not give him a chance to ask. I unlock the door.
He is exactly where I knew he was. His amber eyes drop to my face and his weight shifts at the doorframe.
"Get all of them," I say.
They come fast.
Thaw first — gold eyes already braced, the bond at my sternum carrying his alarm before he reaches me. Harek behind him. Dean and Daron in the hallway behind the others. I step back into the bathroom and let them crowd in — Thaw and Harek at my shoulder, Crull filling the doorway, Dean and Daron in the hallway looking through.
