She’s not denying it.
In hostile territory, with a knife on the table and a man strapped to a chair, a magic-blood doesn’t announce herself. The silence is its own answer. I leave it there.
She straightens her legs, stands, and crosses the room slowly. Each step is something I feel in the floorboards under my feet before I hear it. She crouches in front of the rabbit. Her fingers close around it with a care that doesn’t match anything else about her. For a second, her hand on the matted fur stays still, and I see something she didn’t mean me to see: a muscle working in her jaw, a shift in her shoulders that isn’t composure. It passes. By the time she stands with the rabbit in her hand, she is iron again.
She walks to me. Stops close.
Her scent reaches me. Wolf and woman. And something beneath it that my wolf is reaching for. Automatic, urgent, without thought. I brace against it. It doesn’t help.
She holds the rabbit up. Eye level.
“Do you know what this is?” Her voice is low and flat.
“A toy.”
Her eyes narrow. “It belonged to a child. The child’s things were put in a cardboard box at a facility south of San Antonio. Filed by code. Codes for feeder regions. This box was coded F-7.”
She lets the name sit. I say nothing.
“F-7 is your corridor. Your junction.”
I know. I have known the corridor since before it had a code. I have never seen it stamped on a box with a child’s rabbit inside.
“I don’t know anything about a facility.”
“You didn’t before. Now you do.” Her eyes don’t leave mine. “That’s why I’m here. For those who went through your corridor.”
I take a slow breath. “Figured as much.”
She doesn’t seem impressed by my response.
“How many of them were children?” The question is quiet and comes unexpectedly. But she’s not asking to wound. She’s taking inventory — measuring what I know against what I should know.
I hold her eyes. “I don’t know.”
Three words. True. She hears it. A man who kept the schedule in his head, who knew every transfer date, every contact call — and never knew that one specific number. I ran the system so I wouldn’t have to. My guilt is real, and it has no faces in it.
She sets the rabbit on my thigh.
The small weight of it lands against my bare skin like a hand. The button eyes point up at me. I can’t look away, and I don’t want to look at it.
“I’m going to tell you about one of them,” she says. “And while I tell you, I’m going to cut you. Just one. It’s not for pain. It’s so you carry him on your skin for an afternoon. That’s less than he carried. But it’s what I can give you today.”
She picks up the knife from the table. “The blade is silver,” she says. “It’s going to leave a mark. If it gets a chance to heal.” She tests its weight in her palm the way you test a tool that’s part of your hand. No performance. No display.
Common sense tells me that I should be recoiling as she moves closer.
I’m not. My nostrils flare, and not for the first time.
She crouches in front of me. Takes my left arm. Her hand closes around my wrist above the cuff — warm, steady, her palm pressing the bones into place. Her thumb finds my pulse and stays there.
She can feel my heartbeat through my skin. I sense it in the way she focuses on her thumb for a moment.
“Number Forty-Seven,” she says. Her voice drops. Not softer. More contained. “A boy. Five, maybe six. The older captives said he came in as a toddler. He didn’t know his name. He didn’tknow he had a name. When someone asked him what to call him, he held up four fingers. Then he held up seven.”
I stop breathing, attention fixed on her.
“F-7, 47. He knew himself by your code.”