Page 51 of Dose

Isla’s hand closes around my forearm. “How long will you be gone?”

“Two days if the access window holds.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Longer.”

Her grip tightens.

We finish the briefing before I take her into the corridor. Only after the Archive door closes do I bend my mouth to her ear.

“You’ll sleep in my bed every night I’m gone.”

It is not a request.

She tips her face up. “What happens if I don’t?”

“When I come back, I tie you to it and make you come until you forget every word except Daddy.” I tighten my hand at her waist. “Then I start again.”

Her breath catches, but she does not look away.

“That sounds less like a consequence than an incentive.”

“Sleep in the bed, and I’ll do it anyway.”

“Then your threat structure needs work.”

“Promise,” I correct.

Her eyes darken. “I’ll sleep in your bed.”

“Good girl.”

Four days until Atlanta. Two nights away if the model survives contact with reality.

Her hand stays in mine all the way back to the lab.

19

ISLA

Two days. Forty-eight hours. Two thousand eight hundred and eighty minutes.

The number looked manageable when it was part of Ezra’s operation model. Six hours after Theon leaves for Atlanta, it becomes an act of hostility.

I try to work. I map Site Nine’s environmental systems, marking the controls the team must preserve and the points where surveillance can be interrupted without affecting the clean rooms. I verify Theon’s inventory without moving anything, because reorganizing another chemist’s laboratory during his absence is not affection. It is sabotage with good intentions. I update degradation models that do not require updating.

None of it helps.

I check the time. I listen for footsteps that cannot arrive yet. I touch the mark on my throat and feel my chest tighten.

This is ridiculous. I am twenty-four years old. I survived nearly two decades inside facilities designed to make survival conditional on obedience. Forty-eight hours should not be able to dismantle me.

But I have never had anyone to wait for.

That is what I failed to account for. Theon’s absence does not feel like the ordinary absence of a person in another room. It feels unfinished. Every sound in the corridor demands inspection because it might be him, although I know it cannot be.

I am staring at the same page in the common level when Raphael stops beside my chair.