Page 23 of Dose

“My jaw is fine.”

“Your jaw could cut glass right now, sweetheart.”

Nikolai says nothing. He hasn’t said anything since I walked in, which is worse than everything else combined. He watches me over Jenna’s shoulder, those pale eyes assessing, mapping variables, deciding whether the brother in front of him is compromised and by how much. I’ve watched him do it to targets. It feels different from the inside.

“Is she a threat?” Lucien asks.

The room quiets. Lucien barely speaks at these things, and when he does, everyone recalibrates. He’s sitting on the floor by the couch with his back against it. He isn’t teasing or prosecuting. He’s asking the only question that matters.

“To us?” I set down the coffee. “No.”

“You knew her for eleven minutes before you sedated her.”

“I read her work before I read her.”

“And that told you what, exactly?” Ezra asks. “That she has excellent penmanship?”

“That she flagged two unstable batches Korte’s people missed. That she rebuilt a chain-of-custody system better than mine. That she verified the purity of every compound in the stockpile and then gave me the lot numbers of the cleanest D-40 so I could taper forty-one children safely.” I look around the room. “She organized her own execution around their welfare. She stood in front of my pistol, and her last request was that I take the dosing histories first.”

“People say things at gunpoint,” Damon says.

“People beg at gunpoint. She briefed me.”

Raphael, who’s been quiet in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder, makes a low sound of consideration. “Korte requested her by name.”

“Korte requested me by name for six years. What does that make me?”

No one answers.

“She’s like us,” I say. “Not like Korte or Kessler or the handlers who chose that work. She was taken as a child and shaped into an instrument before she was old enough to understand what was being stolen. Then she spent most of her life being praised for the result.”

“You got all that from an audit,” Darius says, but the mockery has drained from his voice.

“From her work. From the way she moved through the lab. From the way she looked at the children’s records.” My hands have curled around the counter edge. I make them let go. “The difference is that no one came for her. She never had a Nikolai. No one mapped the security rotations, killed fourteen guards, and showed her a way out. She built Korte’s defenses because the program taught her to build whatever it asked for. We all know what that is.”

“But,” Marcus says quietly.

“But she hates them. She hates what she helped them do, and she hates herself for doing it. I know what that looks like when someone has spent years hiding it. You’d have smelled it on her at three hundred meters.”

Darius and Damon exchange a look. Raphael tips his head, reassessing. Marcus watches me with the stillness that means he’s tracking my heart rate and breath.

“Your cortisol’s been elevated since you walked in,” he says. “But not fear-elevated. You’re arguing from somewhere lower than your head.”

“Thank you for the biometrics.”

“Any time.”

“He sees himself in her.” Dominic hasn’t spoken until now. He’s by the far wall, and today his face is mostly his own, which means he has chosen to be present as himself, and that costs him. “That’s what this is. He walked into that archive and found a mirror.”

“No.” I meet his eyes. “I found all of us. Every person in this room was a child someone decided to weaponize. She’s still performing the role they wrote for her because no one ever showed her she could refuse it.” I let that settle. “At Ashford, she chose the children. That choice was hers.”

Dominic holds my gaze for a long moment. His expression shifts somewhere between recognition and grief.

“Mirrors,” he says. “I know a few things about those.”

Nikolai shifts, and the room stills. Jenna slides off his lap onto the couch beside him. He leans forward, forearms on his knees.

“You brought a stranger into our home,” he says. “Not the Compound. Not a safe house. Here.”