Seraphina dug her nails into her palms until they left deep crescents in the skin.
It was a small, sharp pain, but pain helped. It grounded in a way that she ever so desperately needed. It silenced the whisper that slithered through her thoughts when her focus slipped.
The whisper had no voice, not really. Just want. Just hunger.
She held her breath until the hum faded. Until her body rembered it was still here. Still human. Still hers.
Then, like a ripple through the dark, a mory broke loose.
Uninvited.
Unwelco.
Unstoppable.
tal walls. Cold. The floor beneath her was concrete, slick with sothing she didn’t want to identify. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Just past the bars of her cage, sothing hunched and twitching breathed too loud in the dark.
Not human. Not anymore.
It had once been a man. He used to hum lullabies between sobs when he thought no one was listening. Then ca the injections.
After that, he scread.
She could still see it—his neck elongating like pulled taffy, bones snapping, rearranging beneath skin too thin to contain them. His jaw unhinged, his smile too wide. Too many teeth.
He hadn’t spoken since that last night.
But he’d looked at her. Right before he fed.
The cage beside hers was always filled.
The one across from hers was always empty—waiting for the next experint... the next human who didn’t know what was coming next.
"You’ll join him soon," Adam had said over the speaker.
Her lungs squeezed. Panic pressed against her throat like a hand. She closed her eyes and forced air in through her nose, out through clenched teeth.
Not there. Not anymore. She was safe and sound back at university, and everything was fine. She would never go to Country M, she would never see her sister again, she would never be betrayed again. This was a fresh start, and she wasn’t about to ruin it by losing it.
Taking in another deep breath, her surroundings sharpened as she anchored herself to the present.
Fluorescent lighting again—but this ti above chalkboard walls, not a cage. White linoleum floors, scattered backpacks, lazy students flipping through paper or scrolling on their phones. The room slled like cheap deodorant and burnt coffee. Not blood. Not ammonia.
At the front of the room, a balding man in a forest-green button-down cleared his throat and adjusted a stack of papers.
The naplate on the desk read:
DR. RENALDI – BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Fitting.
Sera let his droning monotone wash over her. It was boring enough to serve as a lullaby—flat, nasal, nothing like Adam’s low, clinical voice or the cold efficiency of lab assistants scribbling notes while monsters scread.
"Welco to Behavioral Psychology," Dr. Renaldi began. "This sester, we’ll examine the motivations behind human behavior. Why we do what we do. Classical and operant conditioning. Reinforcent. Punishnt. You press the right lever, you get the right response. Humans are predictable."
Her mouth twitched. Not a smile—just the ghost of one.
Try pressing levers in a cage full of monsters. Let’s see how predictable it feels when the experint smiles back.
She didn’t laugh. Didn’t even exhale. Just started scribbling in her notebook, movents steady. Controlled. Detached.
The boy beside her shifted, brushing against her sleeve as he leaned to whisper sothing—probably a joke. His breath slled like mint and energy drinks. The scent hit her like a slap.
Her shoulder jerked away before she could stop it.
Not visibly. Not enough to draw attention. But her insides had already recoiled, her pulse hamring against her throat. A deer scenting blood.
She didn’t hear what he said. Didn’t care.
Because behind her eyes, sothing else was moving.
Sothing inside.
It didn’t speak. It didn’t have to.
It showed her what it wanted.
That boy’s throat—split open.
His tongue—still moving.
His hands—twitching as the skin lted into smooth gray flesh.
One of hers.
She blinked the vision away and dug her nails in again, this ti even harder than before.
She wasn’t an Alpha. She might have beco sothing different, but she refused to be an Alpha. Maybe a leftover experint. A glitch in the matrix of survival. But definitely NOT an Alpha.
But she knew this much: she didn’t need to rule. She didn’t need to lead a pack or raise a flag.
She just needed to survive.
To blend in.
To stay unnoticed.
A new line appeared in her notebook beneath the morning’s entries:
Don’t trust your instincts. They don’t belong to you anymore.Trust your mory.Start small.Think like prey. Not a predator.Survive.
Just until it starts again...because it would.
She could feel it in her bones.
Winter was calm. Quiet. But spring would co. And when it did, the world would start to unravel—just like before.
And this ti, she’d be ready.
Dr. Renaldi’s voice carried on, describing Pavlov’s dogs and Skinner’s box. The terms blurred in her ears. Operant conditioning. Negative reinforcent. Predictable response curves.
None of it mattered.
Not when the boy beside her still slled like warm skin and nervous energy. Not when soone two rows back was chewing gum with their mouth open. Not when she could count every scrape of pencil against paper like a trono in her skull.
And then—
Laughter.
Sharp. Wet.
Just close enough to mirror that awful rasp from the cage.
Her vision blackened at the edges.
It took everything not to flee.
Instead, she bit the inside of her cheek until the taste of iron grounded her again.
Across the front of the room, Renaldi droned on: "So scholars argue that violent pathologies stem from unresolved trauma, especially in isolation. Others claim it’s inherited—that so people are simply born wrong."
Laughter rippled through the class again. Soone muttered sothing about serial killers and red flags.
Seraphina didn’t join in.
She didn’t even breathe.
Because she hadn’t been born this way.
She’d been made.
Crafted. Cut apart. Pieced back together in a basent full of steel and screams.
And now?
Now, she wore her old face.
Sa cheekbones. Sa lips. Sa crooked mole on the underside of her chin. But the inside?
That was theirs.
They’d carved her into sothing new. And no amount of makeup or sunglasses could scrub that clean.
The lecture ended.
Chairs scraped. Backpacks zipped. Soone dropped a coffee cup outside the door and cursed.
But Seraphina didn’t move.
Her legs felt numb. Her fingers ached from how tightly she’d been gripping her pen.
She checked her phone again, hoping for a different answer. But it remained the sa... November 1st. It was still the sa day. It has only been a few hours back in this world...
And she was already starving.
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