Page 12 of Dose

So I won’t leave the sublevel without a reason. The fence has an indoor version.

“Timeline, Doctor?”

“Ten days. Sooner is better.” She pauses at the door, and her steel frames catch the light. “Summer. If you find anything anomalous, anything at all, you come to me directly. Not Kessler. Not the site director. Me.”

“Understood.”

Then she’s gone, and the door seals behind her with a pneumatic hiss, and I’m alone with the hum of the fume hoods.

I stand still for a moment. Just one. Then I open my cases.

The reference standards come out first, each vial checked against my manifest, glass cold from transport. Then the validation columns, the calibration weights, the sealed syringes of mobile phase. My hands do this beautifully. My hands have never once betrayed me. I line the vials in their rack in ascending molecular weight, and the order of it should soothe me the way order always has.

It doesn’t.

Somewhere above my head, forty-one children are being properly installed. If I do what I was brought here to do, Korte’s chemistry will be harder to break and her stockpile harder to touch. I was requested by name.

I pull the first cabinet’s inventory log and begin.

The pressure behind my sternum keeps knocking, and for the first time in my life, I stop pretending there’s no one at the door.

6

THEON

The centrifuge finishes its final cycle at two forty-seven in the morning, and my body files a formal complaint.

Forty-one detox protocols. Forty-one children whose blood chemistry I’ve reconstructed from stolen medical files, each one a small chemical hostage negotiation I’ll conduct across six weeks of careful tapering. My eyes burn. My hands have started making micro-errors in pipetting, the kind of drift that gets people killed in my line of work.

I seal the samples, log the batch, and strip off my gloves.

The corridor outside my lab carries sound the way water carries scent—faint, directional, unmistakable. Laughter. A low moan. The unmistakable rhythm of skin meeting skin.

The brothers are unwinding.

I follow the noise up to the common level and stop in the doorway to let my eyes adjust to the low amber light. The living room has been rearranged the way it always is on nights like this—couches pushed into a loose constellation, cushions on the floor, a bottle of Raphael’s absurdly expensive whiskey open on the side table like a hostess gift at the world’s strangest dinner party.

Bodies everywhere. Ours and theirs.

The regulars are here—the vetted few who knew exactly what they were walking into and have kept coming back for years. Mira, the ER surgeon with the filthy mouth. Calla, who runs a gallery and once told Marcus his mask was derivative. Aiden, broad-shouldered and grinning, currently pinned to the wall by Marcus with a forearm across his collarbone.

“You gonna do it or just breathe on me?” Aiden taunts.

“I’m listening to your heart rate,” Marcus says against his throat. “It spiked when I grabbed you. Spiked again when I said that. You’re embarrassingly easy to read.”

“Then read faster.”

Marcus laughs against his skin, drops to his knees, and Aiden’s head thunks back against the concrete.

Nikolai occupies the big armchair by the far wall, Jenna riding him with the unhurried confidence of a woman who has decided that patience is its own form of cruelty. She’s naked except for the diamond choker at her throat, her rounded belly catching the lamplight as she rolls her hips. His hands frame it—not gripping, cradling—before sliding down to her hips.

She sees me first. Of course she does. She smirks over her shoulder, breathless and wicked. “Look who crawled out of his lab. Thought you’d fused to the fume hood.”

“Eyes on me.” Nikolai’s voice comes out as gravel, one hand rising to catch her jaw and turn her face back to his. “You can torment my brother later.”

“Promises.” She grinds down. His breath catches, and for one raw second the vigilance in his pale eyes gives way to hunger.

“Theon.” Darius’s voice floats up from the couch, wrecked and delighted. He’s stretched across Damon’s lap, Damon’s hand wrapped around his throat with the exact pressure that keeps Darius pliant without cutting off his air—I know because I’ve measured their oxygen saturation during this, at their request, for science. “We saved you a spot. Well. We saved you a Mira.”