The cold comes back for me then, the way it always does once the heat of her image burns off—reclaiming my spine inch by inch, settling its weight into my joints, reminding me where I am and what I am and how little either fact has ever mattered.
I breathe through it, slow and even, the loose-hipped ride. Somewhere above me the water keeps falling and the hidden lens keeps drinking, and I picture whoever’s on the other end of it, some bored soul in a monitoring room watching the asylum’s worst acquisition kneel in the dark and grin at nothing. I hope they’re unsettled.
I hope they go home tonight and can’t quite say why. It’s the only courtesy I have left to extend, and I extend it generously.
My grin is splitting my face ear to ear when the camouflaged stone groans and gives—a section of the wall I’d catalogued as solid swinging inward on a hidden seam, because this place hides its doors the way it hides its cameras, the way it hides everything—and there he is.
Doc.
Backlit and bone-dry and impeccable in the doorway, arms folded over that ridiculous chest, watching me drip and grin with the flat unamused patience of a man who has been kept waiting by a child.
“Was that necessary?” he says.
My cheeks ache, I’m grinning so wide.
“The neck-gripping,” I ask him, “or the part where I jerked off to the idea of that Omega being mine?”
“Ours,” Doc corrects, mild as milk.
That stops me.
I arch a brow at him, water sluicing off it, and let out a low appreciative whistle.
“Well. You’ve got a crush, Doc?”
“And you,” he sighs, leaning a shoulder into the doorframe like he’s got all night and none of my problems, “have an obsession. The distinction matters less than you’d hope.” His pale eyes move over me, clinical, cataloguing, finding the blue of my lips and the violence of my shivering and rating none of it worth a comment. “Ready to come out?”
“Gotta wash off my cum first.”
“Use a towel.” He says it with an eyeroll so dry it could start a fire, like he’s discussed my emissions a hundred times and found them tedious on every occasion.
Then, almost as an afterthought, the thing that actually came down here to be said:
“Crowe’s here.”
I whistle again.
Longer this time. A drawn-out two-note thing, the kind you’d use to call a dog or warn a friend, because the arrival of Silas Crowe is both.
“Well, well,” I drawl, tasting the shape of it. “Now the holy trinity’s assembled.”
Three of us in one building.
The doctor who studies the monsters, the killer they couldn’t cage anywhere else, and the man who makes the dead beautiful.
If the people who run this place had a single working instinct between them, they’d feel the floor tilting under their feet right about now. They don’t. They never do.
That’s the whole reason men like us end up in rooms like this in the first place.
“Crowe volunteering again,” I muse, mostly to watch Doc’s face do nothing. “Let me guess. The institute thinks a soft-spoken undertaker with a poetry habit is a stabilizing influence on the violent ones.”
“The institute,” Doc says, “thinks a great many things that aren’t true. It’s the building’s defining feature.”
“Does he know about her yet?”
Something moves behind the glasses, gone too fast to name.
“He will.”
