Page 7 of The Beast's Baby
He drew the blood without further comment from her.
She wouldn’t look at him either and, though he didn’t want to admit it to himself, the rebuff stung. He’d tried to help, after all. Had wanted to make her see the beauty in what she was a part of, and if all she wanted was to see the ugliness, then there was nothing more that he could do about it.
“I really hope you’ll come around,” he said when he stood from his seat on the stool.
It was an uncomfortable thing. Next time perhaps he’d sit next to her on the couch instead.
“I really doubt that I will,” she replied, tone clipped, gaze remaining fixed on the fake window in the wall.
He gave a soft sigh, collected himself, and grabbed hold of the cart.
“Next time would you mind leaving that thing and just bringing the damn needles?” she asked, finally looking at him again. “It’s ridiculous, don’t you think? Putting on this show?” He raised his eyebrows, and she did the same, adding, “If you’re going to be honest with me, I might as well return the favor. Don’t you think?”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll check if next time I can only bring the damn needles.”
He didn’t really mean to make a joke, but there was the ghost of a smile on her mouth before she looked away from him again. It was encouraging. Perhaps she would come around. For her own sake, she really should. Or Phase Two might get uncomfortable.
Chapter 3 - Isobel
She didn’t sleep well that night. Weird dreams haunted her; she kept startling awake. Her heart was still pounding a mile a minute when she woke in the morning, as though from an extended nightmare she couldn’t remember. She’d reluctantly taken a warm shower just to take her mind off how her skin ached.
She didn’t feel right.
“I think I’m getting sick,” she told Jay when he entered in the afternoon.
Without the cart, she noted.
He was wearing green, which was her favorite color on him; it made his eyes into even deeper pools than they normally were. And she was not the type of person to compare eyes to pools, but his seemed like they went on forever. Which was physically impossible but a metaphysical probability since nothing ever ended. Not really. Including her stint in this laboratory, apparently.
She was stuck, as she had already concluded.
“You’re not getting sick,” Jay said, tone perfunctory, as though that was the end of any discussion on that subject. But she really felt as though she was coming down with something.
“I feel like I’m getting a fever,” she disagreed. “My body is all… weird.”
He frowned lightly, arranging the three needles on their sterile silver dish on the coffee table. He didn’t seem to want to think about her body’s weirdness. Yesterday, she hadn’t thought she was getting anything from him but perhaps… Perhaps he wasn’t quite as unaffected as he would want her to think.
Of course, it was madness to try to fuck him in front of fifteen cameras—and those were only the ones she could see—but the aim wasn’t to wrap her legs around his waist and have him inside of her; the aim was to incapacitate him and get the fuck out.
There was a huge flaw to this plan, though, and she’d realized it the night prior: she didn’t know where the fuck ‘out’ was. So, even if she could somehow avoid drinking her tea—which two mornings in a row she had failed to accomplish with the cameras keeping such apparent and close watch—andmanage to shift into wolf shape,andovertake Jay,andsteal his security card… Then what?
There were guards everywhere, surely. She saw them patrol by the large window she was currently staring out of, overlooking the hallway outside. And it wasn’t the same guards. A place like this would probably have an army of guards. She’d be stopped before she so much as reached the outer walls of the place, much less the actual exit.
She looked at Jay, wondering why he was so convinced that he wasn’t getting played by the people in charge of the trial. He was borderline fanatical, she could tell. Glory be and all that. Searching to carve out a space for himself in the history of the world, no doubt. Nothing was more dangerous than an ideological adherence to whatever one was told, and he seemed to have tied his sense of self closely to the outcome of the trial. His reputation, his career, they were probably what made up most of his identity. And he had the clinical mask on to prove it. She wondered what his actual role was in the bigger scheme of things.
He reached out his hand to her the same way he had the day before.
She hesitated again, but then offered him what he wanted, resting her wrist against the palm of his open hand. His fingers closed around it, but gentler than the day before. The day before his grip had been hard, almost unrelenting, and she hadn’t known if it was meant to send her a message to do as she was being told or whether it had everything to do with his own frustrations at what she’d said to him.
He hadn’t been fazed by it; she had concluded that much.
“What are you getting out of all of this?” she asked.
He smiled then. For the first time. And she was startled at the suction that appeared in her stomach. She had spent twenty minutes together with him for a month. There should be no startled suction simply because he did something unexpected.
“Not very much glory,” he admitted. “It doesn’t really work like that when you’re a part of a research team. But I will have been a part of it. An integral part. Just like you.”
“And the reason why the phases weren’t written out in the contract?” she asked. “You still think they didn’t do anything wrong when they didn’t inform me of exactly what it was that I was getting myself into?”
