We go through a corridor next. The ceiling drops. The walls close in. The fluorescent buzz gets dimmer, the light yellower, cheaper. There are doors on both sides — heavy steel, observation slots at eye level. One of them is open. A guard inside is eating a sandwich. He looks up as I pass, chewing, and goes back to his food.
Another corridor. The man on my left has a grip on my bicep that’s going to leave bruises. The one on my right is half a step ahead, leading. Neither of them speaks. Their boots echo. Mine drag.
“In here.”
It’s a room with concrete walls. A drain in the floor — dark, dry, waiting. There’s a metal chair bolted to the slab, restraint points welded to the arms and legs. A second chair is opposite it, unbolted. A table is set between them. Nothing on it.
The light overhead flickers. On off on off on. The same dying-tube rhythm I felt through the bond when Briar pushed Mia’s nightmares at me. I know that rhythm. I know what rooms with that rhythm look like from the inside of a three-year-old’s head.
I’m standing in one.
“Sit down.”
My body doesn’t want to sit in that chair. I know what that chair leads to. My wolf, even muffled behind the runes, is throwing himself against the suppression with a fury that makes my jaw ache.
The men don’t wait for my body to cooperate. Hands on my shoulders, pushing me down. My ass hits cold metal. Straps go around my wrists — click, click — ankles — click, click — a band across my chest that pins me to the backrest.
Same positioning Briar used in the cabin. The thought arrives out of nowhere.
The men go. The door closes. The lock engages — heavy, mechanical, a sound that has finality built into it.
I test the cuffs out of habit. The wrist angle is different from Briar’s — these aren’t designed to prevent shifting, because the runes are already handling that. These are designed to prevent a man from standing up.
The room is cold. Not freezing — a temperature that’s chosen for its effect on the body over hours. Cool enough to raise gooseflesh. Cool enough that by midnight, the cold will be in my joints, and my muscles will be stiff, and my ability to maintain composure will have been chipped away by my body’s constant low-level demand for warmth.
I know this technique. I’ve used it. Not in rooms like this. In fields, in the back of the meeting hall. Confinement. Temperature. Patience. The alpha’s toolkit for wolves who crossed lines.
The chair I’m sitting in is the other side of my own method. Mine has never been this extreme. I’ve never needed a drain in the floor.
Briar is far away. A warmth in the back of my skull that I have to reach for now instead of feeling automatically. The distance and the runes together have thinned her to almost nothing. She’s agitated. Her wolf is circling. I can feel the motion of it, the anxious pacing of a bonded female whose mate is in distress.
I push my end down. Hard. I don’t want to send her what this room feels like.
The fluorescent tube flickers. The drain waits.
Time passes.
The cold works. It starts in my fingers and toes and moves inward by degrees. Each hour peeling away another layer of resistance that I didn’t know I was using until it’s gone. My shoulders tighten. The shivering starts, small at first, then deeper, the muscles in my back contracting in spasms I can’t control.
Footsteps in the corridor. I count them — two sets. One I recognize. One I don’t.
The lock disengages.
The regional operative enters first. Same flat expression he had at the grain silos. Behind him, a second man, and my wolf — even suppressed, even behind the rune-wall — goes on full alert.
Wrong. Everything about the second man is wrong. The scent, the energy, the way the air in the room shifts when he walks through the door. Not wolf. Something else. Something that makes the animal flatten against the floor of my consciousness the way a dog flattens when thunder rolls.
Dragon.
He’s tall. Lean. Dark ash-blond hair tied back from a face that’s all angles. He carries a chair under one arm the way you’d carry a newspaper, one-handed, no effort, the chair’s weight meaning nothing to him. He sets it across from me and sits. Crosses one ankle over his knee.
His eyes are ice-blue. They find mine and hold them, and his attention is like nothing I’ve felt from another person. Not assessment. Not threat. He’s assessing me the way you’d assess equipment before deciding whether to repair it or scrap it.
“Mr. Forrester.” His voice has an accent I can’t place — old, European maybe. “My name is Alastair Creed. I’m the reason you’re still breathing.”
The regional operative takes a position by the door. Creed doesn’t look at him. Creed is looking at me.
“Your deal with my associate was straightforward. You surrender. Your compound stays intact. You cooperate with questioning.” He folds his hands. “Clear enough?”