Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Settle down, Emmitt’s watching. Vyr is like me?

On a bigger scale though. He was much more powerful than her. She could sense it. He felt like he took up much more space than he actually did because of the power rolling off him in waves. And he’d said he could turn off the volume on the cameras. Had he? Her hands were shaking so bad. Her whole body was. She’d felt him there, in her mind, in that memory when she’d lifted the veil and let him in. When she’d reached out for him. That was a secret memory. One of Mom. One of the happy ones. Before everything went wrong.

Vyr is like me.

She’d been alone all these years, hiding, using her powers quietly in her job. She was a counselor because she could calm beastly men and she could sense when they would explode. She could tell who was salvageable.

And that man out there didn’t feel salvageable at all. Not even a little bit. He was dark and out of control, and his aura was the color of mud. He was sick—body and head. Barely keeping control. Barely keeping insatiable power at bay. Oh, the guards here didn’t have any clue what they were dealing with. If that creature out there…that beautiful, deadly creature…ever got it in his head he wanted to leave, he could blow this prison off the map.

No, he didn’t feel salvageable, but Riyah couldn’t let him fade to nothing. Couldn’t let him fade, couldn’t let him use that fire, or it would make everything worse.

He’d called his crew, and now she had to get this video to them somehow. No matter what, this was the most important thing. Every instinct told her she was a part of something big here. She’d always had these feelings. Like when her life took a turn, she could tell if it was important. She could tell if it was a step to something bigger. And she’d been bouncing on stepping stones all her life to get here, to Vyr, to a man who had powers like her.

She wasn’t alone.

And she was going to make sure he wasn’t alone as he lost his dragon, either. Oh, she knew what “cleansing” did to shifters. She knew the stats. Sixty-four percent of them died from the process. How many had been killed from testing, from IESA, and from the New IESA, and from aaaall the little secret government factions that researched shifters? She couldn’t let Vyr be a number. He wasn’t salvageable, but he wasn’t evil. She knew evil. She could sense it, and that man out there was just trying to keep control of something so, sooooo much bigger than him.

That dragon inside of him…it was a miracle the world was still here at all and not smoke and ashes. Vyr, the human, was hands-down the strongest man she’d ever met. Yet, the media dragged him through the mud.

Out of control.

Put him down.

Careless.

Man-eater.

Unsafe.

They didn’t understand what she now did. Vyr had kept an incredible amount of control over the beast within him. He’d been controlling a monster for three decades, and no one gave him the credit he deserved.

“Emmitt?” she asked casually as she slipped the thumb drive with his interview into her pocket where he couldn’t see.

“Hmmm?” he asked, pouring over footage of her interview with Vyr on his monitor. “Fuck, why isn’t there any sound on this one either?”

Ha. Because Vyr had way more control of what was happening here than anyone realized.

“Maybe your cameras are malfunctioning?” she wondered in a chaste tone. “Um, how much time did Vyr get added to his sentence for eating that guard?”

“Huh?” Emmitt asked, distracted as he turned up the volume on the speakers to no luck.

“His sentence. How much longer did he get for eating that guard? Number Seventeen.”

“Oh. Uh, no extra time.”

“Why?” she asked, shuffling her paperwork from the clipboard into a neat pile.

Emmitt tossed her a dirty look over his shoulder. Instead of answering her question, he said, “At least you got the interview footage. That will surely have volume. I couldn’t hear jack shit when you two were talking.”

“I think I should do more of these interviews with him. He seemed to open up. It may make him more docile when he needs to be moved, or…fed.” Or something. “Why did you turn the lights off on him?” That part pissed her off. From here, she could see his heat signature like snake vision. The man was pure red.

“I told you he’s a creature of darkness. We try to keep him calm. His kind like caves, so we do what we can to keep him from going dragon on us.”

“But he’s human, too. You’re keeping a man in the dark with no mental stimulation. That’s awful. I want this changed right away.”

“Veto.”

“I have authority to change his living conditions if they don’t meet acceptable standards.”

Emmitt sighed loudly, stood, and flipped the switch, turning on the light. “Your ass will be fired as soon as he gets overstimulated and Changes in his cell. He needs to do that in a cage especially made for the dragon. You haven’t seen the Change yet, so you aren’t careful like you should be...”

Emmitt continued talking, but she tuned him out since she was too busy looking at Vyr, sitting just where she’d left him on the mattress. He wasn’t looking at her, but had his chin lowered and was running a hand over and over his shaved head, right over the long scar.

She would bet her tits the New IESA did that, and a part of her didn’t even want to know why they’d performed surgery on him. This prison wasn’t what it seemed, at least not in the lower levels. This was horrible mistreatment of a prisoner.

“Why no time, Emmitt?” she asked again.

“Because paperwork, Mercer. We all get the big salaries to work down here, but we all signed the same confidentiality and release forms. That’s the trade-off. You don’t have parents. You don’t have family. You don’t have friends. You don’t have any attachment to the outside world. You know how I know? Because that’s one of the requirements to work down here. You have to be completely expendable. Accept that now, and it’ll make you careful enough to survive this place. Number Seventeen, Chad, wasn’t careful with the monster, and he got himself eaten. No one outside of this facility will be made aware of that fact, and adding to Vyr’s sentence would mean paperwork. We have to explain our actions, and that New IESA lab down the hall? They wouldn’t let us explain our actions. We would come up missing before that happened.”

“You mean people aren’t allowed to know what’s going on down here because of how you treat the Red Dragon. You don’t want the media all over this.”

“You sure are a nosy bitch, aren’t you?”

“No, I think it’s fair to know exactly what I’ve walked into.”

“You’re a bad person,” Emmitt uttered as he rested his butt against the desk. “Know how I know? Because they wouldn’t have hired you if you had morals. And you wouldn’t have taken a job like this if you had a conscience. I don’t have one either. No one down here does.”

“What did Chad do?”

Emmitt shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care.”

“But Vyr cared enough to eat him.”

“Vyr is a monster. He’s mindless, and when he gets hungry, he eats. He’s not a man. He’s pure animal. Wrap your head around that real quick, or you’ll be in the belly of the beast next. We have six months and a shit-ton of work to do to make the world safe again. You’re part of a super hero squad the world will never know about and will never thank you for. We make the hard decisions to keep it safe from monsters like the Red Dragon. Your only job is to make him steady so we can get him where he needs to be.”

“Dragon-less?”

Emmitt smiled, but it never reached his eyes. “No darlin’. Dead.”