Chapter 10
Sable
I work first. Think later. He’s on the floor where he fell, breathing slowly and heavily under the tranquilizer.
I check his airway, his pulse, the injection site on his neck where the dart went in.
No complications. The dose was clean. Whoever loaded that dart knew exactly how much it takes to drop a wolf this size, and they didn’t err on the side of caution.
The child—Alec, one of the Ravenclaw youngsters—is pressed against the wall with his mother’s arms around him. He hasn’t blinked since I got here. His eyes are fixed on the prone form on the floor. His mother’s hand is in his hair, and the look she gives me doesn’t need words.
“He’s unconscious,” I tell them. “He can’t hurt anyone right now.”
She doesn’t answer. She pulls Alec closer and turns his face into her shoulder.
I move through the corridor. Greta is sitting on a bench with the woman who screamed, murmuring to her while she breathes into cupped hands. It’s Hazel, the healer who’d come with me when we came to help with the first batch of rescued wolves. She’s shaken but unhurt.
Two males are already working on the broken door frame, examining the split in the wood without speaking.
One of them, Matthew, turns to me. “We’ll need to replace it. It’ll take about an hour.”
I nod in response.
The other wolves have retreated to their rooms, doors shut. I can’t blame them.
Cameron and Lachlan help me move him back to his room. We use the replacement cot someone dragged in while I was checking the others. His third since he’s been here. The door won’t lock anymore—the frame is split clean through—so I leave it open and put Dane outside.
“Nobody goes in,” I tell him.
He nods, folding his arms across his chest and leaning back against the wall.
Brenna is waiting in the corridor when I come out.
“My office,” she says. “Now.”
I follow her down the hall, through the main room, past the kitchen, where Greta is making tea for Hazel because Greta responds to crisis with a kettle. The office door closes behind us, and the sound of it makes my shoulders tighten.
Brenna doesn’t sit. She stands with her arms crossed, her back to the window, and when she speaks, her voice is low and controlled in a way that’s worse than shouting.
“You lowered the sedation.”
“I didn’t.”
“Don’t lie to me, Sable.”
“I’m not lying.” I keep my voice level. “I’ve been following full protocol since you told me to. Same dose. Same schedule. No adjustments.”
“Then how did he break out?”
“His body is adapting to the drug.”
The words come out before I’ve fully assembled the thought, but the second I say them, I know it’s true. I can feel the pieces lining up, all the small things I noticed and explained away, one by one, falling into a pattern I should’ve seen weeks ago.
“His metabolism has been adjusting,” I say. “Not suddenly. Gradually. When I first reduced the dose, I thought the changes I saw were just his body responding to lighter sedation. But when I put him back on full protocol, the changes didn’t stop. They slowed down, but they didn’t stop.”
Brenna’s eyes narrow. “What changes?”
“Small things. His fingers twitching during wound care. Sleep cycles that shouldn’t have been possible under full suppression.
His heart rate trending upward.” I pull out my notebook and set it on her desk.
“Every dose is logged. Times, amounts, method. Look for yourself. The protocol hasn’t changed. He’s been burning through it.”
She flips through the pages. Her jaw works while she reads. When she looks up, her eyes have gone from hard to sharp.
“You logged a correction dose this morning.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He surfaced two hours early. I assessed, administered, documented.”
“Two hours early. On full protocol.”
“Yes.”
Brenna sets the notes down. “And you didn’t report that immediately.”
“I wanted another cycle to confirm.”
“Confirm.” Her voice drops. “Sable, that man nearly killed a child because you wanted more data.”
My chest goes tight. Not because she’s cruel. Because she’s half right.
“He didn’t,” I say.
“Because Dane darted him.”
“No. He stopped before that. I was there. I spoke to him, and he stopped.”
Brenna goes still. “You spoke to him.”
“Yes.”
“And you believe that stopped him. Why?”
I open my mouth. Close it.
Because he grabbed my wrist and let go when I asked.
Because the pressure he was pushing through the corridor—whatever it is, whatever his body does—dropped the second I spoke.
Because I’ve been in a room with him when he surfaced, and the wolf who looked at me wasn’t the same wolf who fights when men pin him in corners.
Because I think he’s been listening to me for weeks. Through the drug, through the fog, through every morning I walked in and said morning and talked to him like he was a person. The pulse rate, the involuntary movements. I thought those were reflexes. Now, I don’t think they were reflexes.
I don’t say any of it.
Brenna reads my silence the way she reads everything: carefully, completely.
“If he’s burning through full protocol,” she says, “we can’t hold him here.”
“We can adjust—”
“To what? We’re already at the upper limit for sustained sedation.
Go any higher, and we risk overdosing him.
We could be suppressing his system until it doesn’t come back.
” She turns toward the window. The compound is settling outside, everyone trying to return to normal.
“This is a pack compound. Not a containment facility. We don’t have reinforced rooms or specialized staff. We have families. We have children.”
“I know.” My voice is hoarse.
“Then you know what I’m about to say.”
“Brenna, I—”
“He has to move.”
“But maybe…” I trail off. I can’t defend this point.
“I’m sorry, Sable, but there’s no other way.”
My hands curl at my sides. “Where?”
“Aurora is better equipped to handle him,” Brenna says. “Their headquarters are up in the Cascades, outside Seattle. Remote, reinforced, and staffed by people who’ve worked with cases like this before.”
“Cases like this?” I repeat. “You mean wolves who’ve been tortured and experimented on and had their identities stolen.” I can’t keep the bitterness from my voice, even though I know it isn’t Brenna’s fault we’re in this predicament.
“I mean wolves who are too dangerous to be managed in a civilian setting.”
“He isn’t only dangerous,” I say. “He’s traumatized.”
“Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
” Brenna’s voice softens slightly. “I know you care about him, Sable. I know you see the man underneath the damage. But he broke through a locked door while sedated and pushed some kind of force through the corridor hard enough to drop a grown woman to her knees. Imagine what he would have done to that child.”
“I don’t have to imagine.” My throat tightens. “I was there. I saw his hand lift. I saw the claws. I saw exactly how bad it could have been.”
Brenna doesn’t move.
“And then I saw him stop.”
The words come out quieter than I mean them to.
“He heard me. Not as another threat in the room. He heard me, Brenna. He pulled whatever that was back before Dane fired. That has to matter.”
“I know it does. I see the man underneath, too. But seeing him doesn’t make the people in this compound safe, and they are my responsibility first.”
I can’t argue with that. I want to, and I can’t.
“I’m going with him,” I say before I can consider the implications.
“No.” She shakes her head. “You’re needed here. There’s been too much going on to lose you.”
“Hazel will be here. And Greta can step in if needed. And I know Merric can bring in more help from Frostbourne.” I set my shoulders, preparing for her to counter. She does.
“We can’t lose our best healer for one wolf, Sable.”
“He isn’t just one wolf. He’s different; we both know that. And he responds to me. I’m the only one who can reach him. You saw that in the corridor.”
“I also saw a healer who withheld critical information about her patient’s condition because she wanted more time.” Brenna meets my eyes. “Your judgment on this isn’t clean, and we both know it.”
I don’t flinch. I should.
She pauses. Something in her face shifts; not softer, exactly, but more careful. “Merric told me a little about your history. About the mate you lost.”
My hands go still at my sides. The air in the room changes.
“He wasn’t my mate.” My voice is suddenly hoarse. “We never…”
Sealed the bond.
I can’t say it.
Brenna raises her hand. “He didn’t give me details,” she says.
“And I’m not asking for them. But what I know is that you lost someone who mattered.
And I know how you lost him, that he went down, and you sat beside him, and he didn’t come back.
” Her voice is steady, but her eyes are careful on mine.
“And now you’re sitting beside another unconscious man, fighting to bring him back when everyone else is telling you it might not be possible. Do you hear what I’m saying, Sable?”
My jaw locks. The denial is right there—this isn’t that, this is different, I’m a healer doing her job—but the words won’t come.
Because she isn’t wrong about what it looks like.
The vigil. The one-sided conversations. The refusal to let go.
I’ve done this before. I sat beside Jason for eleven days while his body breathed, and his mind was gone.
I talked to him the way I talk to the man in my locked room, and I told him I’d be there when he woke up. And he never woke up.
I hate that she can see it.
From the outside, it must look the same.
It isn’t.
Jason never once turned toward my voice. Never squeezed my fingers. Never fought his way back through the dark to meet me halfway.
He did.
His hand opened when I said wait.
The memory hits so hard I have to close my fingers around the edge of Brenna’s desk to keep from reaching for something that isn’t there.
I can’t explain that to her.
Not yet.
“I made a mistake,” I say. “I own that. But if you transfer him without me, and he wakes up alone in another facility, surrounded by strangers… After everything they did to him back at that hell-hole. That isn’t a fresh start. That’s a repetition.”
Brenna is quiet for a long time. Long enough that I can hear the kettle start to whistle in the kitchen, and Greta’s footsteps crossing the floor to take it off the heat.
“Sable—” she begins.
“Brenna, how long have you been fighting what the purists have done to your kind? Years? Longer?”
“Too long,” she mutters.
“Don’t let him be just another wolf who gets lost to that system. Because we may have taken him from them, but he’s by no means saved.”
Brenna heaves a sigh. “If I let you go,” she says slowly, “you follow Aurora’s protocols. Not yours. You don’t adjust doses without approval. You report everything to Viktor or whoever he assigns. Everything, Sable. No more judgment calls.”
“Understood.”
“And if they determine he can’t be recovered—if they decide he needs permanent containment—you accept that.”
My throat closes. I breathe past it. “Yes.”
She turns back from the window. “I’ll contact Viktor tonight. Transport and a secure room will take a day to arrange.” She pauses. “Pack your things.”
I nod. Turn for the door.
“Sable.”
I stop.
“This is my decision, and I believe it’s the right one,” she says. “But it’s still going to be a locked room. It’s still going to be walls and protocol and someone else deciding if he wakes up.”
I look back at her. “I know.”
“Be there for him when it happens.”
I nod. She doesn’t need me to explain why I will be. Which is a relief, because I don’t really know.
I leave her office and walk back to the healers’ wing. The corridor is empty. The broken door has been replaced. Dane is still posted outside, arms still folded, watching the hall.
“I’m sure it’s safe for you to go now, Dane,” I tell him.
He raises an eyebrow at me. “You sure about that?”
I think about his expression when he saw me in that corridor. How he stopped when I asked him to.
“Yes,” I say. “He’s not going to hurt anyone.”
Dane nods and heads down the hall, and I turn to the repaired door. Inside the room, he lies on the cot with his face turned toward the window. The light is almost gone, and his features are cast in shadow. His breathing is deep and even. His hands are open on the blanket, palms up.
I smooth the blanket and tuck it around his shoulders. My hand stays on his arm for a moment. The muscle is warm through the wool.
“What’s going on inside that head of yours, hmm?” I murmur. I rub my thumb over the point where his pulse beats steadily. And I’m sure—sure—I feel a fraction of a change for a moment.
Two weeks. He’s been here two weeks, and his body has been changing the whole time.
Through the sedation, through the locked door, through every dose I administered and every word I said into a room I thought couldn’t hear me.
He was listening. He was adjusting. His metabolism burning hotter, his sleep growing shallower, his wolf turning toward my voice.
And I missed it because the signs were small and I was too busy telling myself he was just a patient.
He was never just a patient.
My wolf presses forward until I can feel her under my skin, and the tight thing behind my ribs won’t ease no matter how hard I breathe.
Tomorrow, we leave for Aurora. A facility with better walls and better drugs and people who know what they’re doing with wolves like him.
I should want that.
I pull my hand back and go to pack.