He says, “How old?”
“Which one?”
“The youngest. That you know of.”
“From your corridor?”
He nods.
I think of 47, holding up his fingers. “Sparrow is about five now,” I say. “But he would have been around two when he went in.”
His head drops forward. Just for a second. Then he brings it back up.
I back off again and let him sit with that.
For the next cut, I come to him, and he turns his arm within the cuff before I ask. Forearm up, the inside of his wrist toward me. The gesture is so absent of resistance that it stops me. He’s offering his arm the way you offer something you owe.
I make the cut fast and don’t watch his face.
The silence after has a different quality than the ones before. Not empty. The room has been accumulating something all afternoon, and I can feel it pressing down on us.
The next cut, he speaks first.
“The toy,” he says. His voice has lost the commanding edge he came in with. What’s left is rougher. Less managed. “Where exactly did you find it?”
“A storage room,” I say. “Facility basement. Rows of shelving. Boxes on every shelf, organized by code. Each box had an intake number.”
“What was in them?”
“Belongings. Whatever the wolves had when they arrived. Clothes, shoes. Children’s things.”
His hands open on the chair arms. Fingers spreading, closing, spreading again.
“The box this came from,” he says. “F-7.”
“Yes.”
“How many boxes were coded F-7?”
He’s looking at the rabbit.
“I didn’t count,” I say. “The shelving ran the length of the room.”
He nods. Once. Small. And doesn’t speak again.
I make the cut, and he doesn’t move at all. When I sit back, I realize my hands aren’t quite steady. Not from the cut — the cut is fine. Something else. The room, the afternoon, the hours of proximity to this man, and what his scent has been doing to my wolf all day.
She’s been pulling toward him since I walked back through the door, and it’s been building with every hour and every cut and every time I’ve taken his arm in my hands and held it.
My beast wants him. I don’t have a clinical word for it, and a clinical word wouldn’t help anyway. She wants the source of the scent that’s been in my lungs all afternoon. The warmth of his skin under my hands. The pulse I can feel every time I hold his arm for the blade.
I’ve run alone for years. Had men when I’ve wanted them. Short and sweet. We’ve always been comfortable working that way. On the same page.
She has never done this.
It feels like a betrayal. Like I’ve been betraying the reason I came here. I hate it.
Get out of this room. Get away from him.