Chapter 36 Lockdown (Rowan POV)
The passage was tight, dark, barely wide enough for one person. Winters led the way with his phone flashlight, and I followed, one hand on the stone wall to keep my balance. Behind us, the sounds of combat faded… muffled by distance and stone until they were just vibrations in the floor beneath our feet.
We climbed. Spiral stairs, narrow and steep, going up and up until my legs burned and my lungs ached. Finally, we emerged into a corridor I recognized… administrative building, third floor. The same hallway where Hendricks had died.
The building was empty. Silent. Emergency lights cast everything in red.
"Where is everyone?" I asked.
"Lockdown protocol." Winters kept moving, checking each corner before we turned, like he expected Julian to appear any second. "The moment Julian breached the building, the automated systems activated. All exterior doors sealed. All students confined to their dormitories. Faculty either in the Eclipse Chamber or sheltering in place in secure rooms."
We reached his office… a small space cluttered with books, papers, and what looked like twenty years of accumulated coffee mugs. He locked the door behind us, pulled the blinds, and only then seemed to relax slightly.
"Sit," he said, gesturing to a worn leather chair.
I sat. My hands were shaking. Now that the adrenaline was fading, everything was catching up with me… Sage's confession, Julian's revelation, Declan throwing himself between us, the weight of knowing I had a brother who'd spent ten years planning this moment.
Winters pulled a bottle from his desk drawer. Whiskey, looked like. Poured two glasses. Handed me one.
"I don't drink," I said automatically.
"You do tonight." He downed his own in one swallow. Poured another.
I sipped. It burned going down, tasted like smoke and regret. But it steadied me somehow. Gave me something to focus on besides the chaos in my head.
Winters sank into his desk chair like all his strings had been cut. He looked older suddenly, every year of his age visible in the lines around his eyes, the gray in his hair, the way his shoulders curved inward.
"Elena came to me when you were three months old," he said quietly. "She was terrified. She'd discovered Project Chimera through James… your father… and she knew what they'd do to you if they found out you existed. James had already been killed for knowing too much. She was certain she was next."
He stared into his whiskey glass.
"She asked me to take you. Hide you. Keep you safe. I said yes, of course. I'd do anything for Elena. We'd been friends since she first came to Thornhaven, before she joined Nightshade, before any of this started. I thought... I thought I could save at least one of her children."
"One of them?" I leaned forward. "She asked you about Julian too?"
Winters's voice cracked. "She brought him with her that night. This tiny boy, maybe five years old, holding your carrier so carefully. He was so gentle. So protective already. He sang to you in that language Elena taught him… old dialect, something from her grandmother's pack. Made you laugh."
I remembered that song. The memory from the white room. The woman singing, then someone else… higher voice, sweeter, a child's voice layered over hers.
"Elena wanted me to take both of you," Winters continued. "But the project scientists came that same night. They'd been tracking her. Knew she'd give birth. Waited until she brought the baby somewhere they could collect you both."
His hands tightened around the glass.
"They Grabbed him while I was trying to hide you in the back room. I heard him screaming, begging them not to hurt his sister, promising he'd be good if they just left you alone. Elena fought them. Nearly killed one. But there were too many, and she had to choose."
"She chose me," I whispered.
"She chose both of you." Winters met my eyes. "Letting Gabriel go was supposed to protect you. They wanted to suppress both, see if the technique worked on siblings, compare results. But if they only had one subject, they might not look for another. So Elena gave them Gabriel and told them the baby had died during childbirth. Complications. No body to examine because she'd had you in secret, no hospital records."
He took another drink.
"They believed her. Or they pretended to. Either way, they took Gabriel and left. I smuggled you out that night. Placed you with a human couple who had no connection to any pack, no way of knowing what you were. Monitored you from a distance. Made sure you got into Thornhaven when you were old enough, that you received your 'vitamins' on schedule, that no one questioned your humanity."
"And Gabriel?"
"I tried to track him." Winters's voice broke completely. "For years. I pulled every string I had, called in every favor, searched every database. But he'd vanished into the program. Classified. Sealed records. I couldn't find him."
He pulled out a folder from his desk. Opened it. Inside were newspaper clippings, police reports, foster system records going back fifteen years.
"Then I found this," he said, pointing to one article. "Montana, 2018. Foster family found dead in their home. Authorities ruled it an animal attack… bear, probably. But the description of the wounds..." He showed me the coroner's report. Claw marks. Throat wounds. The same MO Julian had used on Tyler and Hendricks.
"That was him," I said.
"That was him losing control when his suppressants failed. After that, nothing. No trace. No records. Like he'd learned to be invisible."
Winters closed the folder.
"I failed him, Rowan. Elena trusted me to protect both her children, and I saved one and lost the other. And what he became, what they made him into..." His voice dropped to barely a whisper. "That's my fault."
"No." I set down my glass. "It's not. You did what you could. You saved me. And Julian… he made his own choices. You didn't turn him into a killer."
"Didn't I?" Winters looked at me with haunted eyes. "If I'd fought harder. If I'd gone to the authorities, exposed Project Chimera fifteen years ago when it might have made a difference, when Gabriel might have still been saveable… "
"They would have killed you," I said. "And buried the evidence. And nothing would have changed except Elena would have lost you too."
He didn't argue, but I could see he didn't believe me.
We sat in silence for a moment. Outside, sirens wailed… emergency response, probably, campus security coordinating with whoever handled supernatural crises. The building shuddered periodically like something very large was hitting it very hard. The fight in the Eclipse Chamber was still going.
"Your mother loved you both," Winters said finally. "More than anything. She used to tell me about Gabriel when he was little. How smart he was. How kind. How he'd bring her flowers he picked, ask her questions about everything, try to help with things he was too small to actually help with."
He smiled sadly.
"She said he had an old soul. That he worried too much for a child. That he tried to take care of her instead of the other way around. She worried about what that meant… a five-year-old who already felt responsible for protecting everyone around him."
"And then they took him," I said. "Made him into a weapon. Used that protective instinct against him."
"Yes." Winters stood. Walked to the window. Peered through the blinds at the dark campus beyond. "He was such a gentle child. Patient. Thoughtful. I remember him reading to you from picture books even though you were too young to understand. He'd make up voices for all the characters. Make you laugh."
His reflection in the window looked broken.
"What did they do to him?" he asked the darkness. "What do you have to do to a child to turn that gentleness into this? Into someone who can kill methodically, frame his own sister, orchestrate mass trauma without flinching?"
I didn't have an answer.
My emotions were a tangled mess… grief for the brother I'd lost before I could know him, rage at the people who'd broken him, terror about what he was planning, and underneath it all, a horrible, aching sympathy. Because I understood. Not the killing, not the cruelty, but the isolation. The feeling of being alone, packless, different. I'd only experienced it for eight days. Julian had lived it for ten years.
"Professor Winters?" I asked quietly.
"Yes?"
"My mother. Elena. Julian said... he implied she might still be alive."
Winters turned from the window. His expression was complicated… hope and fear and something else I couldn't identify.
"I don't know," he said. "The execution was... I wasn't allowed to witness. No one was except the Alphas and their chosen executioners. Her body was cremated immediately after. No funeral. No ceremony. Just... gone."
"But you don't think she's dead."
It wasn't a question. I could see it in his face.
"I think," he said slowly, carefully, like the words were dangerous, "that Elena was very good at making people believe what she needed them to believe. And I think if anyone could have survived what they did to her, orchestrated a fake death, disappeared completely for seventeen years to protect her children, it would be her."
My heart lurched. "Where would she be?"
"I don't know. I've looked. God knows I've looked. But Elena knew how to disappear. She learned from James… he had contacts, safe houses, people who owed him favors. If she used those resources..."
He trailed off.
"You think Julian knows where she is," I said.
"I think Julian has had ten years to search for her with abilities and resources neither of us possess. If she's alive, he's found her by now."
The implications settled over me like a weight. My mother might be alive. My brother had found her. And neither of them had come for me in seventeen years.
That hurt more than it should have.
"Why?" The word came out small, broken. "Why not come for me? If she was alive, if Gabriel found her, why leave me here thinking I was alone?"