Chapter 28
Savla
Iknew I’d have to talk to her. That was the worst part.
After Krusk and Enka cornered me in the training room and tore through every defense I’d been clinging to, I couldn’t lie to myself as easily. The excuses rang hollow now.
The bond will destroy you. You’re not allowed to want her. Stay away. Keep her safe by staying away.
All of it had cracks and by the time night fell, I was exhausted. Bone-deep. My muscles ached from drills and hauling lumber, my mind was raw from replaying every word my brothers had said.
Then don’t let anything happen to her.
As if it were that simple. I climbed up to my workshop on unsteady legs, intending to carve until my hands stopped shaking. Instead, I ended up staring at the half-finished sculpture of her, the wood grain catching the lamplight along the curve of her cheek.
“You’re trouble,” I muttered at it. At her. At the damn bond.
Eventually, I lay down on the bench in the corner and closed my eyes. Just for a moment, I told myself. Just long enough to gather the courage to go to her tomorrow.
The bond hummed low and steady under my ribs. It wasn’t tugging or even demanding. It was just… there.
I fell asleep to the thought of her laugh echoing off my workshop walls.
I didn’t know how long I’d been out when the world tilted. It didn’t start with sound. It started with absence.
One second, the bond was a quiet, warm presence—like a candle flickering in another room. Not bright, but steady. Familiar and comforting, even when I pretended it wasn’t. And in the next second, it lurched. The candle didn’t just flicker. It yanked.
My entire body jerked as if someone had sunk a hook into my sternum and pulled. I woke with a strangled gasp.
My heart was a drum in my chest. My blood flared hot and sharp beneath my skin. For a half-breath, I didn’t even remember where I was.
Then Ribbon exploded into action. The toad slammed into the side of my body with enough force to nearly flip it. He croaked—loud, frantic and wild. Not his usual dramatic noise. This was sharper, more panicked.
“Ribbon—what—?”
He hit me again, full-body, like he was trying to get me going. My feet hit the floor and the moment I stood, another pulse tore through the bond. Not warm this time.
Wrong.
Every instinct I had—the trained ones, the battle-honed ones, and even the feral ones I’d spent my entire life suppressing—roared awake all at once. My vision blurred at the edges, tunneling and my breathing came too fast.
“Hanna,” I rasped.
Nothing answered. The bond—that steady, constant hum of her—was no longer where it should be. It wasn’t gone. It was quiet and… muffled. Almost as if it was being smothered. Like someone had dropped a thick veil over it and was dragging it away from me. My blood ran cold in my veins.
Ribbon barreled toward the stairs, croaking with sharp, staccato urgency. He looked back at me, eyes wide, and slammed his head against the door. He wanted me to move.
I did. I didn’t decide to, but my body was already moving before thought caught up. I took the stairs in a jump, fingers clenching hard, already ready to pry open doors. The moment my boots hit the hallway floor, I felt it.
A shimmer in the air. A faint, oily residue of magick that made my skin crawl.
Glamor.
It was a type of magick that the warlocks on Hellplane had used often. I’d recognize it anywhere. Powerful, precise magick that was designed to slip around perception like smoke. My lips pulled back in a snarl I didn’t recognize as mine.
“Corwin,” I growled, without proof, without logic—just raw certainty boiling in my gut.
The bond pulsed again. But it was fainter and further away.
No. No. No.
Something old and buried inside of me snapped its chains. My grandmother used to whisper about it in stories. An orc’s last line of defense. The ancient instinct that rose when a bonded mate was threatened beyond reason.
Mating rage, they called it. I’d spent my entire life making sure I never woke it up, but it was already too late. It stormed through me like a wildfire, igniting every vein, every cell, every piece of me that had ever tried to stay controlled and calm and safe.
Not safe anymore.
Ribbon raced ahead, his webbed feet slapping the floor, following a path the wards couldn’t show me—because the wards had been bent. Twisted and glamored.
Hanna’s presence—her self—was slipping further and further away, like someone dragging her down a tunnel and slamming doors shut between us. My vision sharpened with the activation of my primal instincts.
Every smell, every sound, every vibration in the air came into brutally clear focus. There was fear, residual magic and the faint stink of city exhaust from outside, where there shouldn’t be any this time of night. And under it, woven like a thread of poison—Corwin’s cologne. Citrus and arrogance.
My hands clenched into fists so tight my claws—half-flared and uncontrolled—bit into my palms. I followed Ribbon through the building, the glamor trying to slide over my senses, make me doubt the opening doors, the empty hallways and the lack of witnesses.
No one had seen anything, but of course they hadn’t.
The spell didn’t just hide the abductors—it smudged intention, blurred memory and made your mind slip sideways when you tried to notice.
If not for the bond—if not for Ribbon—I might’ve slept through it all.
I hit the coven floor with all the subtlety of a war hammer.
“Hanna!” I roared.
Nothing answered, but the bond jolted at the sound of my voice, a faint answering hiccup of panic and pain. She was conscious. Just barely.
“Savla?” someone called from another apartment—distant and groggy. I ignored them. The rage riding me didn’t care about courtesy. It didn’t care about rules. It cared about one thing.
Find her.
Ribbon slammed into Hanna’s door, croaking viciously. The wards on it were intact. But the scent—her scent—wildflower and herbs and warm skin—was thick in the air. Underneath it was the sharp, bitter tang of restraining spells. And that fucking cologne again. I touched the door.
Magic zapped against my palm, testing, measuring and trying to read my intent like a guard dog. My blood surged in response. And the wards recognized me as clan. As a protector. The door unlocked with a reluctant click.
Ribbon barged in first, but the room was empty. I knew it without even looking.
There were no overturned chairs, no shattered glass. Everything was neat and perfectly in place. Her mug was on the table with a book open, face-down. A shawl was draped over the arm of the chair.
The outward picture of calm. But the air… it screamed. Residual glamor shimmered like heat above asphalt, slippery and silent. My vision went red around the edges.
“They took her,” I said aloud, voice low and lethal. “They took her from here.”
Ribbon croaked, furious, slamming his body against the floor over and over like he could break the spell residue by sheer indignation. I strode to the center of the room and closed my eyes.
Fight like an orc, but think like a witch. I forced my breathing into something akin to a slow rhythm, even as the mating rage clawed and thundered inside my ribs.
“Hanna,” I whispered, “where are you?”
The bond flared—then slammed into something hard and slick.
A wall.
Someone had wrapped her in a glamor cocoon—meant to block tracking magic, coven link spells and location charms. But the bond wasn’t a spell. It wasn’t learned. It wasn’t cast. It was born. And ancient things have teeth.
I dug in, metaphorically and mystically, hunting along the tether that connected us. It felt choked, strangled, but not severed. Distance fuzzied it, but—there. A direction.
South. Fast.
A car. He was using a car.
Corwin.
The mating rage surged, hungry and focused. He’d laid hands on her. He’d terrorized her and made her voice shake, her body remembering fear it never deserved.
He touched what’s mine.
And now he’d taken her from my home. From our clan’s protection. My lips peeled back from my teeth in a silent snarl.
“I’m coming,” I whispered into the bond. “Hanna, I swear to every God that’s listening, I’m coming.”
The bond answered with the faintest flicker of relief—so small I might’ve imagined it. But it didn’t matter as I strode toward the door.
I blinked, realizing that someone was standing there. Enka, his eyes wide, his hair a mess and his bare feet braced in the hallway like he’d raced here half-asleep and forgot to grab shoes.
“What happened?” he demanded. “Sav, I felt—It spiked and then—”
“Corwin took her,” I said. No preamble or softening.
His face drained of color. “How—”
“Glamor,” I bit out. “Clever and strong. But not strong enough.”
Krusk thundered up the hall a second later, half-dressed with his fangs bared.
“What’s going on?” he growled and I met his gaze head-on.
“They took Hanna,” I said. “I can feel her moving south in a car. She’s wrapped up in a blanket of glamor.”
Krusk’s eyes darkened. “You’re sure.”
Every instinct in me screamed, every ounce of orc-blood under my skin burned and every piece of the bond I’d tried to deny was now a compass needle pointing straight at her.
“I’m sure,” I growled.
Krusk nodded once. “Then we hunt.”
Enka’s jaw clenched. “I’m coming with you.”
I shook my head. “No. You wake Dristan, Zara and Tabitha. Tell them a glamor is masking her. They’ll need to counter from here.”
Enka hesitated.
“Enka,” I said, my voice rough with the strain it was taking not to just rush to the door. “I need you here for now. Then rally the clan and join us where we’re going. The coven will track us.”
For a second, I thought he’d argue, but then he nodded, his eyes blazing. “Bring her back.”
I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t need to. I was going to bring her back. There was no question about it.
Krusk clapped a hand on my shoulder, heavy and solid.
“You’re not going alone,” he said. “I’m driving.”
Normally, I’d refuse. For something this personal, I’d usually insist I worked better alone, that I didn’t need anyone, that I was fine. But I wasn’t fine, and I didn’t have time to pretend otherwise.
“Okay,” I rasped. “Let’s go now.”
Ribbon bounded beside me, croaking with a fury I’d only ever heard when someone tried to take his food from him. He loved her just as much as I did.
Ribbon released a chirp—loud and final—and barreled ahead of us, clearly intending to come too.
“Absolutely not,” Krusk muttered.
Ribbon ignored him, and we moved. We went down the hall, down the stairs, and out into the night air, tainted with the ghost of that car’s exhaust. The mating rage rose higher with each step, no longer a roar but a focused, sharpened blade.
I’d always feared it—feared becoming ruled by it and losing myself to it.
But now? Now I understood something my father never lived long enough to teach me. The mating rage wasn’t here to break me. It was here to break them. For daring to touch her, to take her. For thinking, even for a moment, that they could steal my mate and live.
When we reached the SUV, Krusk slid into the driver’s seat. Ribbon somehow squeezed into the back, one of the youngling-sized seats that he’d already installed groaning in protest.
I stopped beside the open door, heart hammering, the bond burning like a brand in my chest. I closed my eyes one last time.
Hanna, I said, not speaking aloud but along the bond itself, forcing myself down it like light down a tunnel. Hold on. Don’t give up. Don’t you dare let go. I’m coming for you.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing, but then there was a flicker. A flash of panic and finally, a stubborn, blazing anger that felt so much like her it knocked breath out of me. She might be scared, but she was fighting.
Good.
Because so was I. I climbed into the truck, slammed the door, and didn’t look back at the building. Krusk started the engine.
“Point me,” he said.
And I did, following the tug on the bond that I wished was stronger.
I wished that I’d claimed her when I’d first seen her.
If I had, then it would have grown stronger with every moment I accepted it and wrapped it around us.
Denying it had stunted it enough that it was hindering my ability to find her.
I cursed it and then myself for my stubbornness.
First we went south, away from the city—toward Corwin—toward the male who thought glamor could hide them from an orc’s bond. The mating rage coiled inside me, steady now. Completely patient and intently focused.
I let it.
For once, I didn’t fight it. Didn’t smother it. Didn’t pretend it wasn’t part of me. I aimed it.
Because for the first time in my life, fear of what I might become was nothing compared to the horror of a world where she wasn’t in it.
“Faster,” I told Krusk, voice low and deadly.
And without a single word, he accelerated in the direction of my mate. Somewhere ahead, under layers of stolen magick and bad intentions, my mate’s magic flared like a star—calling me to her. Calling me home.