Lahat ng Kabanata ng Alpha VS Omega' Twin VS Twin (A Dark Werewolf Romance): Kabanata 161 - Kabanata 170

POV: Professor Fell | Hermetic Facility, Sub-basement, St. Thomas HospitalHe did his evening rounds at nine o'clock every night without exception, which the children had learned to track the way prisoners tracked guard rotations, counting minutes, bracing themselves before the footsteps reached the corridor.Fell was aware of this. He had noted it in the log as a predictable stress response and had concluded it was not worth modifying, because the anticipatory cortisol spike produced interesting biological data in hybrid subjects that baseline conditions didn't generate. Everything produced data if you measured it correctly.He started at cell one and worked toward cell twelve, the same order every night, clipboard in hand, checking the readings his assistants had logged since his afternoon rounds. Heart rates, transformation indicators, feeding compliance, sleep cycles. The hybrid biology expressed differently under stress than under calm conditions, and the facility provided both i

POV: Callum | Hermetic Facility, North EntranceThe alarm had been running for four minutes when Silas died.He had been at the north entrance with the second wave, covering the external perimeter while Tom worked the ward sequence and the fighters pushed through the maintenance corridor. His job had been simple: watch the street, signal if Hermetic response came from outside rather than inside, give the team thirty seconds warning.He had given them the warning.Three Hermetic security operatives had come from the building across the street, which meant they had an external post nobody had documented, which meant Ash's intelligence had a gap, which meant Silas had seen them coming and had done the thing he had always done, which was make himself useful.He had stepped into the open to draw their attention. All three operatives had turned toward him. The team inside had gotten their thirty seconds.Callum heard the sounds of it from inside the maintenance corridor. He did not stop mov

POV: Marcus Hale | Hermetic Facility, Level OneHe had needed the job.That was the true thing, the one Marcus Hale had been telling himself for two years and eleven months, which was how long he had been working security at the facility beneath St. Thomas Hospital. He had needed the job because his previous security work had dried up after a contract dispute, and this one had paid well and asked few questions, and the few questions he had asked had been answered with language about research and medical advancement and the kind of clinical framing that made things sound like they were part of a system rather than a choice.He had a daughter at university. He had a mortgage. He had the ordinary financial geography of a person whose life had accumulated obligations faster than income, and the job had fit into that geography neatly and he had let it.He had learned not to look directly at certain things.The cells on level two were below his assignment. His rotation covered level one and

POV: Callum | Tunnels Beneath St. Thomas HospitalThe tunnel network ran toward the river, which was why Tom had arranged the boats.Callum had the layout in his head from Ash's blueprint, the secondary exit that ran northeast from the facility's sub-basement through Victorian brick that predated the hospital above it by forty years, emerging at a maintenance dock on the Southwark bank that the Port Authority had decommissioned in 1987 and which sat unused and unwatched in the specific way that London's forgotten infrastructure sat unused and unwatched, which was completely.He moved fast, Lily against his shoulder, and counted the children behind him by sound rather than sight because the tunnel was dark and he needed his eyes forward. Twelve sets of footsteps, some steady and some dragging, Cormac at the rear carrying two of the youngest, Sarah on his left with a nine year old holding her hand and moving with the careful deliberateness of a child who had learned to be quiet and was

POV: Cormac | Southwark Bank, Thames DockHe had not fought alongside Callum's people before tonight.He had fought against them, twice, and he had watched them fight from a distance during the Battle of the Rookeries, and he had formed an assessment of their quality that had been accurate as far as it went. What he had not understood from a distance was the particular thing that made them different from pack fighters, which was not skill or strength or tactical sophistication, though they had all of those, but something in the way they fought for each other, the specific quality of attention they paid to the person beside them, covering without being asked, adjusting without communicating.Pack fought for hierarchy. Callum's people fought for each other.He understood the difference better after forty minutes in those tunnels than he had in two years of observing from the outside.He was on the dock now with four of Callum's fighters and the Parliament guards between them and the boa