13. Chapter 13 #2
“You talked to me,” I say.
She glances at me. “What?”
“In the room.” I’m remembering small details, pieces surfacing from different depths. “You talked. When you came in.”
Her hand goes still on the window frame. “You heard that?”
“Not all. Some parts were clearer.” The sentences are coming easier now. The more I speak, the wider the path gets. “Someone called Dara was eating.”
Sable’s lips part. She’s staring at me, her eyes bright.
“And Greta…and goats.” The corner of my mouth pulls. “In a garden.”
“The goats in the herb garden,” she says. Her voice has gone quiet.
“Yeah. And you said…there was a list. Names. People were hurting.” The memory is heavier there. I remember her voice changing, the pain that came through. “You were sad.”
She breathes out. Slow. Long. Her eyes are bright, and she turns back to the window. I watch her jaw work, as if she’s holding something together.
“I didn’t think you could hear me,” she says. “The sedation was supposed to suppress everything. You shouldn’t have been able to—”
“I know.” I look at my hands. “But your voice… It came through. When nothing else did. Like it had a way in that the drug couldn’t block.”
She’s quiet. The mist moves through the trees. When she speaks again, her voice is steadier.
“What else do you remember?”
“Your hands on me.” I say it simply. Not to embarrass her, just because it’s true.
“The wet cloth. You talked while you worked. It was…” I search for the word.
I can’t use “good” because it will make her uncomfortable.
But it did…it felt good. “Normal. You made it feel normal. Like I was a person, not a…thing on a table.”
Her throat moves. She looks at the floorboards between her feet.
“You said you’d find my name,” I say.
She looks up. “I did say that.”
“You said I was never a number.”
“You’re not.”
The silence stretches. The bird sings. The mist moves.
“I haven’t found it yet,” she says. “Your name. I’ve been looking, but—”
“Rafael.”
She stops. Looks at me.
“That’s my name.” It sits in my mouth, strange and familiar at the same time. “Rafael.”
Her lips part. “You remember? How?”
I look down at my hands. The cuts from the restraints are still red around my wrists, and the number on my forearm is still there, black and ugly against my skin.
“I don’t know. It just came back.” I look at her. She’s staring at me with an expression I can’t read, and her eyes are bright again; the same brightness from when I told her I’d heard her talking to me.
She is quiet for a second, as if she’s afraid to move too quickly and scare it away.
“Rafael,” she says, softer this time.
In my own mouth, the name feels rough. Uncertain. In hers, it sounds like it might belong to someone real. A man who had students, and coffee on the piano, and music under his hands.
“It suits you,” she says. Then she smiles, small but real.
I look back at the number on my arm.
Maybe it did once.
I don’t know if it does now.
I don’t know what kind of man it belonged to, what he liked or ate or played. I just know it’s mine, and hearing her say it makes the knot in my throat ease in a way I haven’t felt since before the facility.
The moment holds. The mist moves. The bird sings.
Then the sound comes.
Low. Rhythmic. Mechanical. Distant but getting louder, cutting through the morning air. Not rain. Not wind. Something with blades.
Rotors.
My wolf’s head snaps up inside me. My body goes rigid.
“Helicopter,” Sable says. She’s moved from the window. Her voice has shifted, not the warm tone from a moment ago. The flat, decisive tone of someone assessing a situation. “Search pattern. Coming from the south.”
She crosses to the door. Opens it a crack. Listens.
The sound gets louder. Moving north along the ridge.
She turns to me. Her face has gone still. I can see her thinking, the options running behind her eyes, fast and practical.
The helicopter is an answer to every practical problem in the room. Transport. Shelter. Medical care. Someone else taking responsibility for what happens next.
For me, it is straps and sealed air. A locked room. A stranger’s hand deciding how much of me gets to stay awake.
All she has to do is step outside.
If she waves, they’ll see her. If they see her, they’ll land. If they land, I go back into someone else’s custody, and every fragile piece of myself I found in this cabin gets handed over with the incident report.
“If I go out there,” she says, following the same path in her own mind, “they’ll see me. They’ll land. They’ll take us both back to Aurora Headquarters.”
“That’s where we were going?” I ask.
She nods. “Brenna, our alpha, thought they were better equipped to…handle you.”
I don’t respond to that. I know what it means.
The rotors pass closer. The window rattles softly in its frame.
My hands stay at my sides. My wolf is still, waiting for her choice.
“If I stay in here,” she says, “they’ll sweep past. This place is well hidden.”
The room seems to hold its breath with us.
She looks at me, and whatever she sees makes her face settle.
“I’m staying with you,” she says.
Then she pulls the door shut.
I shake my head. “You should go back. It would be better.”
“For who? Not you.” She puts her hand on my arm, and something warm moves inside me. “I’m not taking you to another place to be locked up, Rafael. I won’t.”
“I’ll go into the mountains.”
“No. There’s no way I’m leaving you out there alone.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“No, you won’t.” Her hands move to her hips. “You don’t even know where you are! How would you survive out here?”
“My wolf—”
She stops me. “Your wolf is half the reason you’re in trouble.”
“He’s the reason I’m alive.”
“I understand that. But he’ll be the reason they keep hunting you if I leave you to fend for yourself. Nope.” She shakes her head. “I’m staying with you. I’ve been taking care of you for weeks. I’m not stopping now.”
I exhale slowly. “All right.” I don’t like the idea of dragging her into my mess, but the relief I feel right now is unexpected.
She glances up as the helicopter passes overhead. The shadow of it flickers across the floor through the broken window. The sound peaks, loud enough to vibrate the floorboards, and then fades, moving north, moving past.
She stands with her back to the closed door and her hands flat against the wood. Her breathing is fast. Her jaw is tight.
“They’re gone. But I’m pretty sure they’ll circle back.”
“Yes,” I say.
She frowns down at the floorboards, lips pinched.
“Okay,” she says, as if coming to some fresh conclusion. “Okay. Here’s what we’re doing.”
She pushes off the door. Her hands are moving, pulling on her clothes, shirt first, jacket over it, while she talks.
“I’m not just disappearing into the mountains with you.
That’s not a plan. And I’m not abandoning my pack.
But I’m not letting Aurora put you back in a box, either.
” She pulls her jacket around her. Zips it firmly.
“So we move. We put enough distance between us and their search grid that I can stabilize you, make contact with Brenna on my terms, and argue for a different approach. One that doesn’t involve straps and locked rooms.”
“Okay.”
She looks at me. “I need you to understand…I’m going back to Ravenclaw. Eventually. And when I do, there are going to be consequences for this. But I’m not going back until I know you’re somewhere they can’t just scoop you up and start over.”
I watch her face. The set of her jaw. The way her hands are steady, even though her voice isn’t entirely.
“You understand?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“Good. We head north. The ridge gives us cover, and there’s water on the other side. We keep moving until we find somewhere defensible.” She glances at my chest. “You should get dressed.”
I pull on my shirt. It’s stiff with dried rain but wearable. She’s already at the door, checking the window.
She opens it. Morning light. Pine air. The mist lifting off the trees.
“Stay close,” she says. “And if you feel the shift coming—”
“I’ll tell you.”
The words come out whole. Both of us notice.
“Good,” she says. “Let’s go.”
She steps out. I follow.
The bird has gone quiet. The helicopter fades to a thin pulse in the distance.
The interval stays with me anyway.
Two notes. A minor third. A sound I answered with my own mouth, not because someone forced it out of me, but because I wanted to hear what would happen.
Rafael.
My name is Rafael.