Chapter 34

While a wolf lover will flat-out leave a bite on the curve of your neck like a cave dweller, so that everyone knows you’re theirs, and a cat lover will scratch up your back for the same reason, bears are sneakier.

I know, I know, bears aren’t sneaky. Accepted fact. Or is it?

Want to know my theory? Well, I think bears are the sneakiest of all the changelings when it comes to possessiveness. They’ve just tricked us all not to expect the sneaky—so when it happens, we just don’t see it. But I have my eyes wide open now. No sexy bear is getting their secretly sneaky paws on me.

—“Jocie’s Opinions” in the September 2083 issue of Wild Woman magazine: “Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication”

SHAKEN WITHIN BY Yakov’s blunt claim, Theo nonetheless narrowed her eyes. “I think you should get used to a woman who knows her own mind and will do as she pleases.”

An equally narrow-eyed look in return. “Oh, I like you just how you are, milaya moya. Except for the putting-yourself-down part. That’s your grandfather speaking. And that bastard needs to be erased from existence—especially when it comes to you. He has no rights to your mind or your thoughts and I’m never budging on that stance.”

She parted her lips, shut them. Because . . . he was right. She wasn’t a dog on a leash. She was Theo, who had a twin who loved her even if he didn’t understand love anymore, who was a nurse with all types of esoteric medical knowledge in her brain, and who had somehow become entangled with a bear who’d decided she was his.

Cheeks hot, she decided to ignore the confusion of her emotions to focus on the task at hand. “The thing is that Jax isn’t usually administered orally. It’s too weak in pill form. Even the street junkies inject it—or if they’re really hard up, they buy the cheap pills the dealers make up and try to liquefy the stuff before snorting it.”

“Used in concert with another drug for reasons unknown?” Yakov asked as he rose to get a resealable plas bag from his daypack.

“Unlikely.” Taking the bag when he held it out, Theo began to put the pills inside—after she snapped a photo of each one. “I’ll send the photos to Pax and have him ask a specialist to confirm my findings, but the thing is, we’re looking at drugs that shouldn’t go together—not even in mad scientist experimental terms.”

“It’s possible this stash didn’t belong to one person,” Yakov pointed out, then went to examine all the other legs on the bed. “This is the only bed with hollow legs in the entire ward. Could’ve been a hiding spot for multiple people.”

Theo could see his point. “If so, they’d then have to have a way of getting rid of the excess. Flush it down the toilet?”

“I can see it.” Yakov screwed back a leg that had proven empty of anything. “Here’s another way if there was a risk the pills might not flush cleanly—like most big facilities, this place likely ran on schedules. Wouldn’t take much to know when to secrete a few temporarily in your mouth just before being herded outside. Spit them out when no one’s looking, grind them into the grass under your shoe.”

Theo thought about the high ratio of staff to patients—and then she thought about the patient who’d been standing in the hallway knocking her head against the wall while no one paid much attention at all.

Yes, there’d been gaps, chances for a patient or patients to evade medication.

“If we have patients smart enough to hide pills,” she said on a burst of hope, “there’s a possibility they survived the deep clean, got out. They could give us the answers to all our questions.”

Yakov nodded, but his expression was grim when he met her gaze. She knew he was right to be skeptical. It was one thing to get out of taking meds, quite another to escape a death squad. Especially if that death squad came in the form of medics with injections the patients couldn’t dodge.

Shrugging off the cold chill that accompanied that thought, she put the bag of pills in the daypack, and the two of them continued on with their search. They found a few other pills but those looked to have been dropped and forgotten. Nothing like the first hoard.

“I don’t think we’ll have to wait long for the results from Pax,” Theo said. “I’m guessing most if not all the drugs were produced by our pharmaceutical arm, so one of their senior staff should be able to ID them at a glance. It’ll give us something to work with while we organize the analysis of the actual pills—in the unlikely scenario that the pills were bespoke, contain drugs we don’t know about.”

At this point, she wasn’t taking anything for granted. “My brother can organize a telekinetic to pick up the samples, or we can courier them to him. The Marshall Group has the labs to make quick work of the task, but I’ll ask him to also send identical samples to an unaffiliated lab.” It was highly doubtful that her grandfather had taken a lowly lab tech into his confidence, but better to be safe.

“You mind me looping Pasha into the conversation regarding the drugs?” Yakov asked. “Be good to have a clear set of eyes on this—he’s got no chemical or pharmaceutical background, has no biases there.” A shrug. “Might see a link we wouldn’t.”

Accepting that she and Yakov were now too invested to be totally clear-eyed, she made sure that both Yakov and Pavel were copied into her message to Pax. Photos of the drugs sent, she carried on in her search, but that was it as far as drugs went.

They did, however, find several printed pages that had fallen behind a heavy metal filing cabinet. Given that most facilities such as this one were digitized, those either had to be archival documents or had been printed out by a member of staff who didn’t want to carry a device.

The only reason they discovered the pages was that Yakov took one look at the incredibly heavy piece of furniture, put his arms around it, and just moved it. Like it weighed nothing.

When she stared at him, he grinned. “I’m not all brains, pchelka. There’s plenty of brawn in this beautiful body.” A grinning tap of his finger against her nose.

Skin heating from within, she busied herself with checking behind the filing cabinet to make sure they hadn’t missed anything . . . and touched her own nose when he wasn’t looking. Why had that odd little touch felt so good?

Answers first, Theo, reminded the more pragmatic part of her. You don’t deserve anything good until you know the truth.

Breath catching at the stabbing pain of it, she nonetheless knew her internal voice was right. “Nothing else here,” she said a few seconds later—right as a sneeze erupted out of her. “Just dust and cobwebs.”

“You sneeze cute. Such a tiny sound.” Yakov’s cheeks creased once more. “Papers are in some kind of code.”

Theo, flustered all over again, considered the page he was holding out. “Might be old-fashioned shorthand. I feel like I saw similar writing on the desk of my grandfather’s aide.”

“I can run the pages through our computer systems, see what it spits out,” Yakov offered, his arm brushing hers. “Unless you’re worried about secrets here.”

Theo met the gaze of this bear who knew all but one enraged piece of her darkness. “No secrets,” she said. “Not about this.” She closed her hand over the cold metal of her bracelet, that unspoken truth choking her from the inside.

This, whatever was happening between them, it couldn’t be based on a lie. She needed to tell him. But her guts froze up every single time she tried to open her mouth, force the words out.

It had been far easier to admit to being a murderer.