Chapter 22
Sable
The room they’ve given me has a window that doesn’t open and a door that locks from the outside.
Nobody said that out loud. The lock is quiet, a soft electronic click when Nadia closed the door behind me. The kind you could miss if you weren’t listening. I was listening.
Six hours since the gas took Rafael. Six hours in this room with its clean sheets and sealed window and the flat gray light of an afternoon that won’t end.
I’ve showered. Changed into the clothes they left: sweatpants, a long-sleeved shirt that smells like laundry detergent. Eaten half a sandwich from a tray that had been here when I returned. Sat on the bed. Stood up. Sat again.
My hands won’t stop shaking.
Not enough for anyone else to notice, maybe. But I notice the tremor when I pick up the glass. When I fold my arms. When I press my palms flat against my thighs and still feel the flutter under my skin.
My wolf is pressing forward against my ribs, and the urgency has nothing to do with the shift. It is all Rafael. Two floors below me. Drugged, contained, and waking in the place I was supposed to protect him from.
You walked away because staying would have made it worse.
I repeat that until the words lose shape.
If I had fought the staffer, Rafael would have seen it. If he had seen it, he would have broken the glass faster, harder, with everyone watching and every monitor recording proof that he was exactly as dangerous as they feared.
So I left.
And then I cried.
That was what he saw. Not the reason. Not the calculation. Not the part where I tore myself off that glass because I was trying to save whatever chance he still had.
He saw my face fall apart.
He cracked the glass for that.
Now he’s under the gas again, and I’m in a room with a lock I can hear.
The afternoon crawls. I pace. Ten steps to the window, ten steps back. The compound outside is concrete and steel. Guards cross the yard in pairs. A vehicle pulls through the security gate, windows tinted. Another follows.
The rhythm of the building changes around four o’clock.
Footsteps in the corridor move faster. Voices drop lower. A door closes somewhere down the hall…controlled, firm, someone who doesn’t want to be heard slamming it.
I press my ear to my own door. The electronic lock is still engaged, but the wood is thin enough.
“…delegation’s been in with Viktor for hours.”
“Syndicate, apparently. Here about the wolf on the containment level.”
I stop breathing.
“Really? I thought they’d be here for Vex.”
“Can’t believe the nerve of the fuckers.”
My hand flattens against the door.
The delegation from the stairwell window. Creed. The blonde woman with folded hands and icy eyes. The one who made my wolf go silent before I knew enough to be afraid of her.
They’re here for Rafael.
The lock clicks.
I step back as the door opens.
Nadia.
She has two paper cups in her hands. One is for me, apparently, because she sets it on the nightstand without asking whether I want it. The other stays between both of her palms, untouched.
“Tea,” she says. “Not Greta’s.”
“I don’t want tea. You locked me in.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think I had a choice.”
She sits on the edge of the bed, still holding her cup. Steam curls up between her hands, but she doesn’t drink.
“I need to tell you something,” she says, “and I need you to hear all of it before you react.”
My wolf comes up so fast, the room changes.
The paper cup on the nightstand. The steam thinning above Nadia’s hands. The electronic lock set into the doorframe, small and black and suddenly breakable.
“Tell me.”
“The Syndicate delegation is here to negotiate for Rafael. They want him back. They’re offering captives…wolves and dragon-blooded in Syndicate detention. In exchange for him.”
“No.”
“I said hear all of it.”
My hands are fists at my sides. I force them open.
“Viktor’s been in with them all day. Creed is running the political angle. Prisoner releases. Intelligence on active operations. The kind of package that’s hard to refuse when you answer to a council.”
“Viktor would do that?”
“Viktor is doing his job. Listening to every offer. Weighing every option, including the ones that turn his stomach.” Her thumb moves against the rim of her cup. “There’s something else.”
Nadia looks down at her cup. The tea has stopped steaming, and neither of us has touched it.
“The woman with the delegation,” she says. “I told you I didn’t know who she was.”
The stairwell window. She wasn’t on the visitor list.
“I know who she is now.” Nadia sets her cup down. “She’s a researcher. Syndicate-funded. Her name is Fell. Dr. Faith Fell.”
The last name hits first.
Fell.
Arden in the herb garden, dirt under her fingernails, her voice dropping when she said it. Dr. Fell. Thirty-series. Frequency work. A name the staff handled carefully.
Then the first name reaches me.
Faith.
My knees go loose, and I sit because the floor is coming up whether I choose it or not. My hands find my knees, knuckles white.
“…faith has no mercy…”
His voice comes back so clearly I can almost feel the wood of the door against my ear. Ravenclaw. The locked room. Rafael speaking through sedation while I sat outside with my notebook in my lap and caught four words I thought were a prayer.
He wasn’t praying.
He was naming her.
“Sable.” Nadia’s hand on my arm. “Talk to me.”
“I know who she is.” Flat. The healer’s voice. “I’ve known the name for weeks. Arden told me at Ravenclaw. Dr. Fell. Thirty-series subjects. Frequency work. She was the worst of them.” I swallow. “I didn’t have a first name. I didn’t know Faith was a person.”
“She’s claiming she can help him. That Aurora’s containment is damaging his ‘systems.’ She says she can stabilize what our team can’t.”
The scar.
It comes back through my hands, not my eyes.
My fingers on his ribcage in the dim light of the healers’ wing.
Washing around the wounds the way I did every day for two weeks.
The surgical scars I could read—clean, purposeful, the work of a trained hand.
And the other one. The long line curving along his ribs from the fourth to the eighth.
Not clean. Not purposeful. A line traced into his skin with something sharp, by someone who took their time.
I washed around it. Dried it. Applied salve with my fingertips. I knew it was different from the others.
Now I know who did it.
My stomach clenches. I breathe through it…in through the nose, out through the mouth. Trying to calm myself.
“She carved him.” Quiet. Steady. Wrong for what the words carry. “She wasn’t just running experiments. She marked him. Hurt him, Nadia. It wasn’t procedure. It was personal.”
Nadia is quiet.
“And now she’s sitting in a conference room offering to fix what she fucking broke.” My hands are shaking again. “Five years in a sealed room with him. She carved into his body and burned symbols into his skin, and she’s calling it research.”
“Sable —”
“Has she asked to be alone with him?”
Nadia doesn’t answer right away. Finally, “She has. She’s requested access to evaluate him. Says she’s the only one who understands the frequency work. That, without her, Aurora’s suppression methods will push him past recovery.” Her voice is careful. “She’s framing it as a medical consultation.”
The fluorescent light hums. Outside, a vehicle crosses the compound.
“And Viktor?”
“Viktor hasn’t agreed to anything. He’s listening.” Nadia leans forward. “But Creed is pushing. Twenty-four captives. Plus intelligence on three active operations. Viktor can’t dismiss that without hearing it out.”
That’s how they’re making him small enough to trade.
I stand up.
“Where are you going?”
“To find Viktor.”
“Sable, you can’t walk into that meeting. No clearance. You’ll be escorted out, and it’ll undermine every argument I’m making on your behalf.”
“You’re making arguments on my behalf?”
“Since you walked through the front door.” She stands.
Planting herself in a way that says she’s not moving.
“I told Viktor what you told me. The conditioning. The triggers. The fact that Rafael responds to your voice in ways no protocol can replicate. I’m building a case.
If you go down there shouting at a Syndicate delegation, everything I’ve built falls apart. ”
My jaw locks. The impulse to move—push past her, find the conference room, put myself between that woman and Rafael’s cell—is so strong my muscles ache.
“She can’t go in that room with him.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. You don’t know what she is.” I face her. “She’s not a researcher who crossed lines. He flinches from every touch. Every hand that reaches for him, his body expects pain. She did that. She made sure the only touch he understood was hers, and it wasn’t clinical, Nadia.”
I stop. My throat closes.
“She wanted him. Not his data. Him. And she designed a program that gave her five years alone in a room with his body, and nobody questioned it because she dressed it in protocols and published the results.”
Nadia’s face has gone still.
“If she gets access to his cell, she won’t stabilize him.
She’ll trigger every piece of conditioning she built.
His wolf will recognize her—not the way he recognizes a threat.
The way he recognizes a handler.” My hands are shaking openly.
“Viktor will see a wolf who responds to her commands and think she’s helping.
It won’t be helping. It’ll be the thing she trained into him with a scalpel and five years of being the only person who touched him. ”
Nadia takes my hands. Holds them until the shaking steadies.
“I hear you,” she says. “I’m going back into that meeting.
I’m going to tell Viktor exactly what you just told me.
” Her eyes hold mine. “But I need you to stay here. If you go down there, Creed uses your behavior to argue you’re compromised.
Fell smiles and agrees. Viktor has one more reason to consider their offer. ”
Every instinct says go. Find him. Stand at the door.
But she’s right. If I walk in shaking and shouting about scars, I become the evidence. Emotionally compromised healer. Every label they’ve already pinned to me, confirmed.
“Go,” I say. “And Nadia…”
She stops at the door.
“Tell Viktor to ask her about the scar. The one on his ribcage. The long one. Ask her what procedure required a thirteen-inch incision along the costal margin with no purpose anyone can identify.” I hold her eyes.
“If she’s a researcher, she’ll have an answer.
If she’s what I think she is, she’ll deflect. And Viktor will know.”
I pray he’ll know.
She nods once. Opens the door. Steps through.
The lock clicks.
I stand in the middle of the room. Tea going cold on the nightstand. Light fading through the sealed window.
My hands open and close at my sides.
His voice in the cave. The quiet way he said my name…not the desperate way through the glass, but the way he said it by the fire. His hand reaching for mine in the dark.
Always ask.
Like it was the most important thing anyone had ever taught him.
Because no one asked him. Not in years. Not once.
She never asked.