razor sharp teeth filled her jaw. The shift was slow and looked tortuous as she fought against it, the fur drawing in again as she shook her head and sobbed.
“That’s not me. It’s not me,” she begged. “Please take it away.”
“Accept it, stop fighting,” Janice growled, taking a handful of her hair and yanking her head back. I could feel her anticipation, her hope, her thoughts racing through my head. Their experiments had never gotten this far before. It had always failed until now.
The girl started screaming in a way that made my heart bunch up in my chest. She shook her head, convulsing and going limp in the chair.
“Stabilise her!” Janice commanded and the nurse rushed forward with a syringe, injecting it into the girl’s neck.
But she didn’t stop jerking, her hands shifted into paws, her eyes bulging, then blood spilled from her nose and she stopped convulsing. Her eyes stared lifelessly up at Janice. And the bitch just tutted.
“We’ll try again tomorrow,” she growled then the visions faded altogether and suddenly I was standing back in that room, my eyes locking with Quentin’s. Janice was unconscious as Quentin kept her under his spell and the usually unshakeable guy looked at me with the colour draining from his face.
“They’re…taking the inmates’ Orders away?” he rasped and I nodded stiffly, my throat burning, my stomach knotting. I released his hand, backing away, swiping a palm over my face as I tried to process what I’d seen.
Pike was responsible for this. She’d organised the whole thing. Hired Janice. She must have known what was happening down there this whole time. That they were ripping out people’s Orders and trying to force them to accept another that wasn’t theirs. It defied the stars. Defied all Fae laws. It was repugnant, vile.
Quentin heaved and I looked over at him in surprise. For all the sick things he did in this room, this was the first one I’d ever seen him unable to stomach.
“What are you gonna do?” he asked me as my breaths came unevenly. My mind snagged on Rosalie as fear carved a path through my chest. She’d gone down there, risked being caught. What if they’d found her? What if they’d done that to her? Cut out her Wolf? Forced it on another Fae and tried to make her something…else. I snarled ferociously, pacing back and forth, fighting the base urge to tear Janice’s head off. But I had to keep calm. Had to figure this out.
“She won’t say this on camera,” I finally said in realisation. Janice had made a star deal with Pike. If she spoke the truth out loud, she’d be cursed with seven years of bad luck. Pike would feel the deal breaking. And I had the feeling that my boss was far more dangerous than I had ever realised. Crossing her would not end well. Janice’s resilience to Quentin’s torture proved that. She’d rather bleed in here than end up at Pike’s mercy.
I drew in a deep breath through my nose then strode over to the medicine cabinet across the room where Quentin kept his poisons.
“What are you doing?” he asked as I found what I wanted, taking the memory erasing potion into my grasp. I opened it, walking over to Janice and prising her lips apart to pour it in.
“Wait,” Quentin said urgently, catching my arm and I growled in warning. “She’ll vomit when she wakes.”
I nodded, grunting irritably and standing back so he could release her from his power, his eyes sliding back into one for a moment as he did so. She reared up, vomiting onto the floor and Quentin grabbed a hose, washing it down the drain that sat beneath the bed, eerily quiet as he worked.
Janice blinked a few times, glancing between us in horror as she realised what we knew.
I strode toward her, fisting her dark blonde hair in my hand and yanking her head back hard.
“Please!” she begged. “Don’t kill me.”
“You deserve the worst death I can dream up,” I growled in her face, my upper lip peeled back to reveal my fangs. “I’d cut off every one of your limbs and toss you to the psychos in this place to finish the job.”
“B-but you won’t, right?” she asked shakily and I could practically taste her fear.
I let a long pause stretch between us to draw out that terror in her then shook my head.
“No,” I agreed. “Not today. But your death is coming. I promise you that.”
I ripped