50. Annabella
Chapter fifty
Annabella
The spell was inside me. Not pushing at the edges. Not testing the walls. Inside. Threaded through my thoughts like wire through muscle, pulling everything tight and flat and wrong.
Kneel.
The word didn’t come from outside. It came from between my own thoughts, spoken in a voice I almost recognized as mine.
My body obeyed before I could catch it. Knees on rubble.
Concrete edge biting through denim into bone.
Pain, sharp and real, and I tried to hold onto it because pain meant I was still here, but the spell smoothed even that away, turned it distant, academic, like reading about someone else’s discomfort in a textbook.
Submit.
The word wrapped around my mind like chains.
Heavy. Inescapable. I felt my resistance crumbling.
Something in my brain was reorganizing itself, shuffling priorities, and the hierarchy it was building had Simon Webster at the top and me…
nowhere. Just a space. Everything that made me me being ironed out into nothing.
My hands were pressed flat against the debris. I could feel the grit under my palms, the cold of concrete through my fingers, and those sensations were getting quieter. Like someone turning the volume down on reality, dial by dial, until all that was left was the spell’s clean, blank hum.
You belong to him. You always did.
Of course I belonged to him. He was my father.
He’d made me. Trained me. Given me purpose when the world had chewed me up and spat me into a gutter in Ashridge.
Without Simon, I was just a scared kid with bad magic and a wolf she couldn’t control, hiding in a cabin and stealing meat from the Alpha’s territory to keep her mother alive. I owed him everything.
Stop fighting.
Yes. Fighting was exhausting. I’d been fighting my entire life, and what had it gotten me? Prison. Silver cuffs. Kneeling in the ashes of a facility I’d destroyed for people who didn’t care if I lived or died.
My mouth opened. The words were queued up, ready, patient.
Yes, Simon. Yes, Father. I’ll do whatever you want.
Something small. Deep down. A sound.
Not a word. More like a pulled thread in fabric that should have been smooth. The spell stuttered over it, tried to fold it flat, couldn’t.
Ellie laughing.
The sound was so specific that the spell couldn’t replicate or erase it: that shriek-giggle she did when you blew raspberries against her stomach, the one that went up and up until it cracked into a hiccup.
Four years old and already the loudest person in any room.
Gap-toothed and fearless, small fists tangled in my hair, whispering “I love you, Bella” with her face pressed against my neck and her sticky fingers holding on like I might disappear.
He was going to take her. Shape her. Sand down every rough edge and bright impulse until she smiled when he told her to smile and sat still when he told her to be still and forgot she’d ever been anything else.
The thought was a hook. It caught in the smooth surface of the spell and tore.
No.
Small. Buried. But mine.
Another memory broke through. Mom in bed.
Thin arms, bruised veins, the smell of electricity and slow ruin that had replaced the cinnamon and clean laundry of my childhood.
Three years of “it’s rare, it’s unpredictable, you should be grateful I’m helping.
” Three years of watching her disappear by inches while he held the medicine in one hand and pretended he hadn’t caused it.
He’d done it to my mother.
The hook caught deeper. The tear widened.
And then…Sam.
The mate bond was barely a whisper. Simon’s spell was crushing it, trying to reclassify it as irrelevant, an aberration to be ignored. But it was there. Stubborn as a heartbeat.
You exist. You are real. Someone is looking for you.
I am not nothing.
The thought didn’t shatter the spell. It was more like finding a foothold on a cliff face after a long fall - something to press against. Something to push from.
I reached for my wolf.
She’d been silent for so long—caged, suppressed, denied. But she was still there, underneath everything. And she was furious.
I felt her rise inside me. Not taking over. Not fighting for control. Just…present. A snarl of pure defiance that had nothing to do with words or logic. She didn’t care about compliance spells or magical power or political manipulation. She only knew one thing:
We do not submit.
I reached for my magic.
It sparked in the darkness of my mind. Silver-green and familiar, threading through my wolf’s rage like lightning through storm clouds.
I reached for Sam.
The bond hummed. Faint but steady.
Three forces. Three parts of me that Simon’s compliance spell had not been built to fight simultaneously.
Because he’d designed it to crush a witch or to dominate a wolf.
But not both at once. Not this hybrid thing I was, this impossible, abomination that had made everyone from the Ashridge Pack to Simon’s coven look at me with revulsion or fascination or fear.
They braided together. Wolf fury. Witch precision. The anchor of the bond.
The compliance spell hit the braid and shattered.
I felt it go, fragments of cold compulsion splintering away from my thoughts like ice shattering on hot stone. The flattening pressure vanished. My thoughts came flooding back, messy and raw and profane and mine.
My eyes snapped open.
I was on my knees in the rubble of the Mégantic facility. Gray morning light. Ash and concrete. Duke’s hand locked around my upper arm. Simon stood three feet away, hand raised, power pouring from his fingertips.
But something had changed. The air between us split with a sound like breaking glass. Light flared around me, power bleeding out through my skin.
I stood.
Slow. Deliberate. Straightened my spine, and looked Simon Webster in the face.
His hand dropped. Duke’s hand jerked off my arm.
Simon stepped back. One step. It was small, reflexive. And then he caught himself, locked his feet, reassembled his expression into the mask of calm authority. But I’d seen it. An actual step. Away from me. For the first time in all the years I’d known him, Simon Webster retreated.
“That shouldn’t be possible.” His voice was level, but I could see the cords in his neck standing out, the way his jaw had tightened. “Not while you’re restrained.”
I looked down at my wrists.
The silver cuffs were still there. I could see runes carved into the metal now, enchantments linked together in chains of binding and suppression that were supposed to keep everything I was locked in a box.
The binding spells intersected at three points.
Each intersection was a load-bearing junction.
Pull it, and the adjacent enchantments collapsed.
The rune sequences ran counterclockwise but the suppression weave ran clockwise, which meant they fought each other at the crossover points, creating micro-fractures that someone with the right kind of magic could—
How had I not seen that before?
I lifted my hands. Felt the magic build behind my palms—sparks jumping across my knuckles, my wolf feeding the fire, my magic directing it with pinpoint focus.
“These?” I said.
I pushed. Three points. Simultaneous. Precise.
The cuffs cracked. A sharp sound, like a rifle shot, and then the metal split along its seams as the enchantments unraveled in a cascade of dying light. Runes flickered, flared, went dark. The pieces fell from my wrists and landed in the ash at Simon’s feet.
I looked at the marks they’d left on my skin. Red. Raw. Already healing as my wolf pushed regeneration through the damaged tissue.
Then I looked at him.
“I don’t think I need those anymore.”
For one perfect second, I saw it in his face. Not just anger. Not just calculation.
Fear.
My father was afraid of me. Of his half-breed mistake. His failed experiment. The weapon he’d built and lost control of.
Then his expression sealed shut. “Enough.”
The blast hit me in the sternum.
There was no warning. Even so, I tried to brace.
Tried to pull my magic up into a shield.
But he was faster, stronger, and absolutely done holding back.
The concussive blast caught me in the chest; a raw force that picked me up and threw me backward into a pile of collapsed wall.
The air slammed out of my lungs. My vision went white, then black, then splintered into fragments that wouldn’t reassemble.
Before I could drag in a breath, the second strike came.
This one wasn’t physical. It went straight through my skull - a mind-shear spell, cold and surgical, raking across my thoughts like someone dragging a blade through wet canvas.
Every nerve ending fired at once. I screamed, and my magic collapsed.
Just…died. Like someone had poured water on a bonfire and everything that had made me dangerous three seconds ago was ash and steam.
Get up.
I couldn’t. My limbs had the structural integrity of boiled pasta.
Get UP.
I managed to roll onto my side. The world spun and refused to settle. Everything tasted like blood and burned copper.
Simon’s shoes entered my vision. Polished leather. Not a fleck of debris on them. He’d stopped just beyond arm’s reach. He was being careful, even now, and looked down at me with an expression of profound disappointment.
“Predictable.” His voice was cold enough to etch glass. “You overestimate your resilience. You always have.” He adjusted his cuffs. “All that raw potential, wasted on sentiment and half-breed instinct.”
I tried to push myself up. Got three inches off the ground before my arms buckled and I was back in the dirt.
“You could have been useful, Annabella. If you’d been intelligent enough to stay loyal.
If you’d learned to trust the people who understood your limitations better than you did.
” He shook his head. “But you chose wolves over your own blood. You chose a mating bond over everything I invested in you.”
“Fuck… you…”
The words scraped out of my throat like broken glass.
His lip curled. Micro-expression. There and gone.
“You’re not worth my time anymore.”
He turned away from me, adjusting a cuff.
“But don’t worry.” He said it over his shoulder, almost casual. “I won’t repeat my mistakes with Ellie. By the time I’m finished, she won’t even remember having a sister.”
Ellie.
Something broke inside me. I couldn’t let that happen.
“Vivienne, sedate her. Put her in the vehicle.”
Simon glanced at Lydia, who was standing at the perimeter with her face carefully empty. “Prepare for a deeper reset. We’ll do proper corrections when we reach Kansas City. I want her compliant before we begin work on the younger one.”
Then he walked away. Just…walked away. Like I was already erased.
Vivienne’s shadow fell across me.
She was smiling. “Finally.” She crouched, bringing her face close to mine. “I’ve been waiting months for this. Webster’s pet Shifter, on her knees. Where she belongs.”
I should fight. Should bite. Should do something.
But right now, my body was a collection of parts that had stopped listening to me.
Annabella.
Sam’s voice. Not through the air. Through the bond.
I’m coming!
Vivienne leaned in, savoring this.
She didn’t see my claws extend.
Fur raced up my forearms. Muscle twisted, thickened, bones grinding under my skin in a way that should have been crippling but fed the fire instead.
Light erupted beneath the fur, mixing with the Shift, becoming something that was neither magic nor transformation but both at once.
Me; the wolf and the witch. The force of it yanked me up off the ground like a hand closing around my spine.
My knees. My feet. Standing.
Vivienne’s smile froze.
“What—?”
I was still changing. My vision sharpened, colours splitting into spectrums I didn’t have names for.
I could smell Vivienne’s sudden terror—sharp and acid under her expensive shampoo.
Could hear Duke’s pulse accelerating three feet behind me.
Could feel the mate bond burning bright and steady in my chest, Sam’s presence pulling at me like a compass pointing home.
I looked at Vivienne through eyes that weren’t entirely human.
“You should have sedated me faster.”