Chapter 27
Rafael
The road stretches north. Trees on both sides. No headlights behind us.
Faith is alive somewhere in the back of a Syndicate SUV with her face in pieces and the weapon she spent years calibrating taken by the woman driving this van.
I keep turning it over in my head. The monster is a woman on a stretcher. The conditioning she burned into my nervous system will be there for a long time, maybe forever, but the hand that held the blade is broken.
Sable drives. She found a jacket in the back of the van before we left the roadblock; dark, too big for her, the Aurora insignia on the shoulder. Her hair is still loose. Her knuckles are white on the wheel.
She’s never been more beautiful.
She turns her head and catches me staring. “Hey,” she says, smiling.
I smile back. The expression is beginning to feel more natural.
“You good?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. I stretch out a hand and stroke a stray curl behind her ear. She presses her cheek against my knuckles, still focusing ahead.
We drive.
The mountains pass. The sky is starting to lighten at the edges.
When the sun finally emerges, Sable reaches into the center console without taking her eyes off the road. She pulls out a phone, Aurora-issued, standard security equipment. She turns it over in her hand.
“It’s probably tracked,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“One call. Then we ditch it.”
She puts it on speaker and dials. Two rings.
“This is Brenna.” Sharp. Alert. The voice of an alpha who hasn’t been sleeping.
“It’s Sable.”
A beat. “Where are you?”
“Driving north. We’re both alive. Neither of us is injured.”
“The wolf is with you?” Brenna’s voice is controlled, but I can hear what’s underneath it. She’s afraid for Sable. Not of the situation. Of me.
“He has a name,” Sable says. “Rafael. And yes, he’s here.”
“Is he making you say that?”
Sable opens her mouth. I speak first.
“No.” My voice is rough in the quiet van. “She is safe with me.”
The line goes quiet. Brenna breathing. Hearing a man’s voice where she expected the wolf’s.
“Rafael,” she says. Careful with it. Testing it. “You broke Aurora containment. Injured staff. Viktor Parlance has been on the phone with my council for two hours.”
“He sent Dr. Fell into the room with Rafael, Brenna. The same damn room!”
“I don’t know who Dr. Fell is.”
“She’s the one who did the work on him. The frequency conditioning, the suppression resistance, all of it. She tried to make him into something she could use.”
“She’s Syndicate?”
“Yes, goddammit!” Sable’s nostrils flare.
“Creed and a delegation arrived while we were there. She was the researcher who tortured him for all those years. And she wanted him back.” She pauses.
“She spoke to him, Brenna. That’s all it took.
Her voice. The way she always spoke to him in the facility.
His body shut down. She wanted him returned to her program. ”
Brenna is quiet for a moment. “Past tense?”
“She has other priorities now.”
“Sable, you’re not being clear. What happened there? Is she…?”
“She’s alive, Brenna. But she won’t be giving anyone commands again. Her face is broken.”
Another silence.
“He did that?”
“I did.” Sable lifts her chin.
“You maimed a Syndicate researcher?” Brenna says slowly.
“She was going to take him back. To the facility. To everything they did to him. I stopped her.”
“And the Syndicate delegation?”
“They put on a show of negotiating with Viktor, but it was all performance. They ambushed us on the drive out of there, and—”
“The drive out? You broke out of a high-security facility, Sable! Viktor’s having a shitfit.”
“Too bad.” Sable snorts. “He wouldn’t listen to reason. Anyway, Creed and his goons tried to stop us. But he withdrew after Rafael—” Sable pauses. Chooses her words. “Demonstrated what he’s capable of. Creed made the calculation and left. Took Fell with him.”
Brenna exhales. “Viktor mentioned something about the Syndicate offering a trade. Before all of this.”
Sable’s jaw tightens. “They offered to exchange captives for Rafael. Wolves and dragon-blooded held in Syndicate detention. Viktor was considering it.”
My hands tighten on my thighs.
“Captives?” I say.
Sable presses her lips together. “They weren’t serious, Rafael. It was a bluff. You saw how they’d really been planning to get hold of you.”
“How many?” I say.
She glances at me. “Rafael—”
“How many captives?”
Brenna answers. “Twenty-four. That was the final offer.”
Twenty-four. People held in rooms that look like the ones I know. Restrained. Tested. Tortured. Waiting for someone to open the door.
“Then we go back,” I say.
“No.” Sable’s voice is hard. Immediate.
“If they suffer because I ran —”
“You are not currency.” She takes her eyes off the road long enough to lock eyes with me. “You are not an asset, Rafael. Not theirs. Not Aurora’s. Not anyone’s.”
“Twenty-four people—”
“Rafael.” Brenna’s voice cuts through. The whole van goes still.
My wolf goes still. “Listen to me. Viktor Parlance will not trade you like livestock. If he heard their offer, it was because he needed to know what they were willing to give up and what leverage they thought they had. That is not the same as accepting.”
“But—”
“Those captives are Aurora’s responsibility. Not yours. Viktor has other ways to get them out. Ways that don’t involve putting you back on a research table.”
My breathing slows. My hands loosen on my thighs.
Brenna exhales. “But this is not simple. You’ve wounded a senior Syndicate researcher and caused upheaval through their entire facility. There will be consequences.”
“We’re not coming back,” Sable says. “Not yet.”
“Sable, are you sure you—?”
“Positive. I’m not facing another group of ‘experts’ telling me how Rafael needs to be treated. Viktor wanted to keep him restrained, locked up, and drugged until they knew how to control him. When that was what was setting him off in the first place.”
“You can hardly blame him for being cautious.”
“Yes, Brenna, I can. Not only did he refuse to listen to a word I said, he allowed that bitch into the same room as Rafael while he was strapped down and helpless. He has a lot to answer for.”
There’s silence for a beat.
“I’ll contact Viktor,” she says eventually. “Buy you time. But you need to stay off-grid. Ditch the vehicle as soon as you can. The Syndicate will be looking.”
“We need funds,” Sable says. “We have nothing.”
“Let me know where you are when you decide to make your next stop. I’ll wire what I can under your mother’s maiden name. Pick it up in the morning. After that, you’re on your own until I can work something out with Aurora.”
“Understood.”
“Sable.” Brenna’s voice drops. The alpha register softens into something more personal. “Are you sure about this? You’re giving up Ravenclaw. Your position. Everything.”
“Yes.”
“For him.”
“For us.”
Brenna is quiet. Then: “Don’t get caught. And don’t make me regret trusting your judgment.”
The line goes dead.
Sable sets the phone on the console.
“For us,” I repeat.
“Yes. Is that okay?” She looks at me.
“Yeah.” I reach for her hand again.
We drive in silence for a mile. Then she rolls down the window and throws the phone into the dark.
The mountains thin out. The road drops into a valley I don’t recognize. A town appears: a gas station, a general store with a closed sign, a cluster of houses with porch lights on.
Then a sign. Faded. Flickering. PINEVIEW LODGE — VACANCY.
Sable pulls into the gravel lot. The building is squat and dark except for a light in the office window. No cameras. One other vehicle—a rusted pickup with a tarp over the bed.
“Wait here,” she says.
She goes inside. I watch through the windshield. There’s an old man behind the counter. Sable’s talking, gesturing. She comes back three minutes later with a key on a plastic fob.
“Room nine. Around back. He didn’t ask for ID. Said cash in the morning was fine when I told him we’d been in an accident and lost our wallets.”
We park behind the building. Room nine is at the end of a row, single window, peeling paint. The door sticks when she pushes it open.
Inside is one bed with a quilted spread that’s older than I am.
A bathroom with a shower that drips. Carpet worn flat in the path between the door and the bed.
A vending machine hums in the breezeway outside.
The room smells like pine cleaner and old fabric softener and the mustiness of a place that’s been empty for weeks.
I stand in the doorway.
No observation glass. No monitoring equipment. No suppression wards humming in the walls. A television bolted to a dresser. A painting of a mountain that looks nothing like the mountains outside. A thermostat on the wall that I can adjust myself.
Sable locks the door. A motel deadbolt. The kind that turns with a thumb, from the inside, by the people who chose to be here.
“Shower,” she says. “Then, food from the machine. Then—” She stops. Looks at the bed. At me. Doesn’t finish the sentence.
She goes first. The water runs for a long time.
When she comes out, her hair is damp, her skin is flushed, and she’s wearing the same oversized jacket with nothing underneath it.
Her legs are bare. The steam from the bathroom follows her into the room, and the smell of cheap motel soap mixes with the scent underneath, the one that’s hers, the one my wolf tracked through locked doors and chemical fog and mountain snow.
My turn. The water is hot. I stand under it until the dried blood is gone from my hands and the tension in my shoulders eases enough that my body starts to feel like mine again. The clothes from the van’s emergency kit are too small—shirt tight across the shoulders, pants short—but they’re clean.
When I come out, she’s sitting on the edge of the bed with two vending-machine sandwiches and a bottle of water. The jacket is zipped to her throat. Her feet are tucked under her.
“I found some loose change for the machine in a jacket pocket,” she says. “It’s terrible.” She grimaces, handing me a sandwich.
It is. Processed bread, rubber cheese, something that might be ham. I eat the whole thing.
She finishes hers. Sets the water down. Looks at me.
The room is quiet. Outside, the gravel lot is empty and dark. No headlights on the road. No helicopters. No voices calling coordinates through trees.
Just this room. This bed. The two of us, clean and fed and breathing air that belongs to no one.
“You called me mate,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“And I said yes.”
“Yeah.”
She’s looking at me. Not the healer’s assessment. Not the careful read for instability. She’s looking at me the way she looked at me in the cave, and in the cabin, and on the mountain. The hum in my chest drops low, and my wolf presses forward. I want to reach for her.
She stands. The jacket shifts on her shoulders. She crosses the small space between the bed and the bathroom doorframe where I’m leaning.
Close. I can smell the cheap soap and the woman underneath it. Her breath reaches my throat.
“No tempered glass,” she says.
“No.”
Her hand comes up and settles on my chest. Over the heartbeat she’s been monitoring for weeks, through locked doors, through sedation, through the cracked observation window where my blood dried on the surface.
Her palm presses flat. My heart slams against it.
Something answers under her hand. The power Faith tried to own shifts beneath Sable’s palm, deepening as it reaches for her pulse. I can feel it reaching for her. Finding the rhythm of her pulse. Matching it.
Her eyes widen.
“You feel that,” I say.
“Yes,” she whispers. Her hand presses harder against my chest. “What is it?”
The current deepens again. The lights in the room flicker…
just once, just barely. The water glass on the nightstand trembles.
The air between us thickens the way it did in the cave, but this isn’t the destructive force that cracked the glass.
This is something I’ve never produced before.
Something that’s building between us with her hand on my chest and my heart under her palm and the word “mate” sitting in both of us like a key turning in a lock.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s new.”
Her pupils are wide. Her lips parted. Whatever this is, it’s in both of us now: in her hand, in her pulse, running through her body into mine.
The lights flicker again. The vending machine outside goes quiet.
Her fingers curl into my shirt.
“Rafael,” she says. My name in her mouth, the room trembling around us, and something opening between us that neither of us has walked through before.
I don’t know what’s on the other side.
Her hand pulls me closer.