The sedative tasted like copper pennies and regret.

Logan came back in pieces—first the smell of antiseptic and something acrid burning at the back of his throat, then the cold bite of metal against his wrists, then the light, too bright, drilling into his skull through eyelids he couldn’t quite pry apart. His head felt stuffed with wet cotton. Every nerve ending buzzed like a live wire dipped in ice water.

He’d been drugged before. A lot. Enough to know the difference between a roofie in a bar and whatever chemical cocktail they’d pumped into him this time. This wasn’t a street dose. This was surgical. Precise. The kind of thing designed by people who’d studied his metabolism like a textbook and still had the budget to keep trying.

His arms were spread wide, wrists locked into cuffs bolted to a table shaped like an X. Adamantium. He knew the weight of it, the specific density that made his knuckles ache when he flexed. He flexed now. Nothing gave. Not a millimeter. The metal groaned under the strain but held, and the vibration traveled up through his forearms and into his shoulders, which were already screaming from being pinned at that angle for—how long?

Days. At least.

He forced his eyes open. The ceiling was white, acoustic tile, water-stained in one corner. Fluorescent tubes hummed overhead with that particular frequency that made his teeth itch. A lab. Equipment he didn’t recognize lined the walls—monitors, racks of vials, something that looked like a centrifuge. A bank of refrigeration units hummed along the far wall. Cabinets with glass fronts, surgical instruments laid out on a steel tray like a buffet.

His mouth was sandpaper. He tried to speak and produced a sound like a door hinge rusted shut.

The last thing he remembered was a bar in Madripoor. A woman with dark hair and a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. The drink she’d pushed across the counter. The way the room had tilted sideways before his knees even gave out.

Smart. They’d been smart about it. No fight, no claws, no healing factor to outpace the dosage. Just chemistry and patience.

His head dropped back against the table. The sedative was still working through him, dragging him down like an anchor through dark water. He fought it. Tried to count the tiles on the ceiling, tried to catalog every piece of equipment, tried to map the room so he’d know what he was dealing with when—

When nothing. The darkness swallowed him whole.

Blood on glass. That was the image his brain served up when consciousness returned, vivid and wet. Red spray hitting a window, streaking down in fat rivulets, obscuring the hallway beyond. He’d seen it in the dream—or the half-dream, the space between sedation and waking where his subconscious played its cruelest games. Guards cut down. Bodies crumpling. The wet sound of metal parting flesh.

His nostrils flared. The antiseptic smell was still there, but underneath it—copper. Fresh. Real.

He blinked. The room was the same. White tile. Humming lights. The X-shaped table, the adamantium cuffs biting into his wrists. But something had changed. The air pressure, maybe. The quality of silence. The kind of quiet that follows a scream rather than precedes one.

“Hello, Daddy.”

The voice came from behind him, somewhere near the door. Young. Female. Spanish accent. Flat in a way that wasn’t natural, like someone who’d learned to speak from a manual rather than a person.

His blood went cold before his mind caught up. That voice. He knew that voice, or some older version of it, roughened by years he hadn’t been there to witness.

“Long time no see.” she said.

Logan’s head snapped toward the sound. The motion sent a spike of pain through his neck—muscles stiff from days of unconsciousness—but he didn’t care. He craned, straining against the cuffs, trying to see past the edge of the table.

A figure stepped into his field of vision. Short. Lean. Dark hair cut falling long. Blood spattered across the chest and forearms. Two metal claws extending from each hand, glistening red in the fluorescent light.

Not his claws. Hers.

“Laura?”

The name came out cracked, barely audible. His throat was wrecked from disuse and dehydration. He swallowed and tried again. “Laura. Is that—”

She stood at the foot of the table, looking down at him with those dark eyes. Nine years. It had been nine years since he’d seen her. Nine years since Alkali Lake and the Weapon X facility and the fire. Nine years since he’d told her to run, to disappear, to be somewhere the people who’d made her couldn’t find her.

She’d been a kid then. Twelve, maybe thirteen, all sharp angles and sharper instincts. Now she was—what, twenty-one? Twenty-two? The girl was gone. What stood in front of him was a woman shaped by the same violence that had shaped him, and the resemblance hit him like a punch to the sternum.

How had she found him? He’d been off-grid for months. No contact with the X-Men, no trail, no paper trail. He’d been careful. He was always careful, except for that one moment in Madripoor, that one drink from a woman with dead eyes.

And Laura—had she thought he was dead? The last she’d seen of him, he’d been pulling her out of a burning building, shoving her toward an exit while the ceiling collapsed behind them. He’d told her he’d find her. He’d meant it. And then he hadn’t.

The questions stacked up behind his teeth like cars in a pileup. His jaw worked. Nothing came out.

Laura’s gaze drifted from his face to the cuffs, then to the door behind her. Through the window—the window from his dream—he could see the hallway. The red streaks. The bodies on the floor, dark shapes in tactical gear, arranged in positions that suggested they hadn’t had time to reach for their weapons.

She looked back at him. Something moved behind her eyes—not quite warmth, not quite cold.
Then she reached her hand forward…