Page 31 of Dose

I know the language of possession. For eighteen years, I was inventoried, requisitioned, and transferred by signature. At first, I think Jenna belongs to Nikolai. Then I watch more closely.

She does belong to him, but only because she chooses to—and he belongs to her with equal ferocity. She interrupts him. She mocks him to his face. When she announced an hour ago that she wanted pickles, he was standing before she finished the sentence. She rolled her eyes and went to the kitchen herself. He sat back down, although he watched the doorway until she returned.

Possession is not always a cage. Sometimes it is something offered and taken in both directions. I did not know there was a difference.

“You’ve gone quiet,” Theon says.

He is beside me. He has been beside me for two days—when we come up, when we eat, when Darius says outrageous things to test my reaction. Theon’s hand has developed a habit of finding the small of my back when we move through doorways. It rests there with the confidence of a claim. I should object. Instead, I have begun leaning toward it before he touches me.

“I’m taking inventory,” I say.

“Of what?”

“Everything. This room contains more information than my entire life.” The television is loud. Darius is louder. A phone keeps chiming, garlic and coffee overlap in the air, and no one has told me where to stand. My body is still waiting for the instruction.

“Too much?” His voice drops beneath the noise.

“I don’t have a threshold yet. I’m gathering baseline data.”

“Isla.”

“It’s a lot,” I admit. “It’s wonderful, and it’s a lot. Those may be the same compound at different doses.”

His hand settles against my back. I lean into it, and we move toward the table as dinner arrives. I take the seat Ezra recommended. Theon sits beside me, close enough that our arms touch.

When he passes me the bread, his fingers drag slowly across mine. My pulse makes its familiar leap. He watches me feel it.

He is getting bolder. Six days in his lab and two up here, and the touches are longer and less deniable. They taught me touch as examination, correction, or restraint. This is none of those things. I have no experience to compare it with, only the choice to meet each contact or let it pass.

So far, I meet every one.

His knee rests against mine beneath the table. Jenna catches my eye from across the room and grins.

I look down at my plate, although I suspect my face has already told her everything.

It goes wrong an hour after dinner, and it goes wrong over nothing.

Raphael places a lemon dessert in front of me and says, “Eat whatever you want. There’s more.” Then he walks away.

I sit with the fork in my hand. There is no instruction, no schedule, no one measuring my intake against a performance matrix.

Whatever you want.

The floor seems to drop beneath me.

I stand and say I need water, which is even true. I make it out of the room and around the bend to a quiet alcove near the stairwell. That is where my body files its complaint about the last eight days.

My heart climbs past the range where I can call it excitement. My hands go cold. My vision narrows. I know this response. It put me on the floor at twenty-two when I imagined boarding a train.

Eighteen years of conditioning repeat the same warning: freedom is a trap. Wanting is punished. Return to parameters.

I press my back to the concrete and slide to the floor. I put my head against my knees and count by primes.

Two, three, five, seven, eleven. Thirteen, seventeen⁠—

I cannot find nineteen.

“Isla.”