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Cute, but she wasn’t wrong. "Check in every two minutes. Go."

We split up with Keiko going left, Aaron right, and I ventured straight ahead. Rin would remain in the control room to monitor the cameras and alert us of any potential issues. We were nothing if not efficient.

Swiftly but quietly, I moved down the sparse, sterile hallway. The fluorescent lights hummed and flickered overhead.

The way the doors were uniformly spaced apart with small viewing windows made this place feel like a prison or an asylum. I didn’t scare easily—or, possibly, at all—but this place was eerily quiet, even for an after-hours excursion. A chill crept down my spine.

As I continued forward on light feet, high-pitched screams erupted from the room just ahead and to the left.

I stopped and hovered my hand above my knife’s hilt, waiting to see if someone was about to barge out of a door. Until we knew more about what we were dealing with, I couldn’t risk using a gun. The sound wasn’t the issue, but I didn’t make it a habit to go around shooting people who might be innocent.

Jou prowled restlessly, reminding me of his presence, but I couldn’t risk letting him out either. The beast was anything but stealthy or quiet. Destruction was hismodus operandi.

My dragon growled. While dragonkind couldn’t telepathically communicate the way other shifters could, we were more than capable of understanding each other’s emotions. He’d caught the intention behind my thought about his love of destruction.

Now was not the time to pacify a grumpy dragon, but I’d make sure he had time to come out and play before tomorrow’s Council meeting. I would need him to blow off some literal steam before his emotions and desires could override my own.

The screaming continued for another moment before falling silent. Nobody appeared.

Keiko’s whispered voice crackled in my earpiece, "Eesh, this place gives me the creeps."

Glad I wasn’t the only badass feeling that way.

I inched closer to the door where the screams had come from and peeked through the small window. At first, I wasn’t sure what was happening inside the mostly empty room, which was encased in steel.

A brunette woman was strapped face down on a metal table, sobbing and throwing her head from side to side. Her back was bare, but there was a large red mark across her left shoulder blade where a tattoo must have been. Now, it was only angrily inflamed raw skin that was vaguely dragon-shaped.

Suddenly, her back bowed upward, and a blood-curdling scream erupted from her throat. Tendons bulged in her neck and arms as she attempted to break free of the restraints, tugging uselessly against the steel bindings.

Her entire body glowed red moments before a fiery dragon spirit ripped from beneath her skin, bellowing with fury. Flames engulfed the room as the beast took out its wrath on everything in its path, the woman included. Her exposed skin blackened beneath the onslaught.

Horrified, I tried the door handle, but it was locked.

What the fuck was happening?

Next to the table, a machine that was enclosed in steel like the rest of the room came to life with a whirring and clicking sound. A blue liquid flowed from the machine via a tube into a syringe in the woman’s arm.

The dragon flung itself around the room and clawed at the walls, desperate to escape and clearly confused. As the blue liquid seeped into her veins and spread, the dragon whined pitifully. He dove for the woman’s body, disappearing into her skin through the spot where there had once been a tattoo.

The woman groaned once before going limp as the dragon’s fiery essence dissipated within her. Red droplets rose from her skin like sweat before hardening and crystallizing.

The newly formed pyrocrystals fell into an awaiting trough surrounding the table. The trough was angled in such a way that the crystals rolled toward the floor until they disappeared into some sort of collection barrel.

My mouth ran dry as the realization hit me. No, this couldn’t possibly be how Ichiro was manufacturing crystals en masse. Was this just his way of torturing his enemies? I prayed the latter was true.

As I watched, the woman’s charred skin slowly healed thanks to the dragon’s magic within her. The only thing remaining unhealed was her tattoo. The skin there remained raw and red.

"This is beyond sick," Keiko’s voice chimed in my ear, horror evident in her hushed tone.

"What is?" Rin asked.

Aaron’s strained voice came through the comms. "You seeing dragons too?"

"Yes. How many doors are in your hallway?" I asked.

"Twelve," Keiko said.

"Fourteen," Aaron said.