Chapter 30 #2
“I think he does what he says he’ll do. Whether that’s comfortable or not.”
She looks at the duffel. At the truck. At the road heading north.
“We’re not running forever,” Sable says, as if she needs me to know that. “Just long enough for you to heal in your own time.”
“I know,” I tell her. “I won’t take you from your pack, Sable.”
“You’re my pack now.” She touches my cheek. I smile. “We should go,” she says.
“Yeah.” I nod.
We load the duffel. Check the room one last time. Leave the Aurora van where someone will find it and report it eventually.
The pickup’s engine catches on the first try. Sable takes the passenger seat, the duffel at her feet. She’s already going through it, pulling out a flannel shirt, a pair of boots that might almost fit her, the burner phone.
I put the truck in gear. It coughs and grinds as I fumble with the shift.
Sable looks at me. “You okay with this thing?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Out of practice. It’ll come back.”
“Like riding a bike.” She grins.
“Something like that.” I grind the gears again. She grimaces but doesn’t say anything.
The road stretches north. Empty. Open. The mountains are turning gold at the peaks where the sun is hitting, and the valley below is still in shadow.
Sable settles back, props her feet on the dash, and finds my hand on the gearshift. Her fingers lace through mine. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to.
I drive. I get better at it with every mile that passes.
The sun fills the cab. The road winds through country neither of us has seen before. The truck smells like canvas and old upholstery and the faint, dense scent of bear that Decker left behind.
Sable reaches for the radio. Old dial, manual tuning. She spins it through static and fragments—a preacher, a farm report, a country song with too much twang—and then stops.
Strings. A cello, low and warm, carrying a melody I know. Dvo?ák. The New World Symphony, second movement. The largo. The one that sounds like someone describing a place they’ve never been but already love.
My hands tighten on the wheel.
The cello gives way to the English horn.
That solo. I’ve conducted this piece. I’ve stood in front of an ensemble with my hands raised and shaped this exact passage out of the air between the players and the ceiling.
I know where every breath falls. Where the strings come in underneath. Where the brass swells and pulls back.
A note rises in me before I can stop it.
It isn’t like the sounds that shaped my world in the facility. Nothing forced. Nothing dragged out. Just the old instinct of breath and timing, my body remembering music before my mind can decide whether to trust it.
My fingers move on the steering wheel. Small movements. My right hand lifts a fraction off the leather, then settles. Lifts. Settles. The conductor’s habit. The ghost of a downbeat that my body remembers even when my mind doesn’t.
“Rafael.”
Sable’s voice. Soft. I glance at her. She’s watching my hands on the wheel. Watching the small movements. Her eyes are bright.
“You’re conducting,” she says softly.
I look at my right hand. The fingers are loose. Positioned. The angle of my wrist is the angle I held for a hundred rehearsals.
“I didn’t—” I stop. “I wasn’t trying to.”
“I know.” She’s smiling. “What is it? The music?”
“Dvo?ák. The slow movement.” I listen. The English horn gives way to the strings. “I used to conduct this piece.”
“Before?”
“Before.”
The hum deepens, spreading through the steering wheel, through the dashboard. The rearview mirror trembles. Sable’s hand tightens on mine.
“I can feel it,” she says.
“Sorry. I can—”
“Don’t stop.” Her hand squeezes. “Don’t you dare stop.”
I don’t stop. The hum holds the key of the piece, and my body is doing something it hasn’t done in five years: responding to music as music.
Not as a frequency to be extracted. Not as a weapon to be aimed.
As the thing it was before Faith found me and decided that the man who shaped sound in a rehearsal room was raw material for something else.
The movement builds toward its final phrase. The melody returns to the English horn. The strings hold underneath. My chest holds with them, the hum matching the swell, rising with the crescendo, and when the final chord resolves, the note in my chest resolves with it. Settles. Holds.
Silence. The radio moves to the next track, something brighter, faster. I reach over and turn it off.
The cab is quiet. Just the engine. The tires on the asphalt. Sable’s breathing.
“You found it,” she says. “The music.”
My throat is tight. “Yeah.”
“It was always there.”
“Yeah.” I swallow. “I think it was.”
He’s still here.
The man I was before.
Sable squeezes my hand.
“You’re smiling,” she says.
I am. It feels almost normal now.
And it should.
The road opens ahead. The mountains are gold. The woman beside me said “mate” and meant it. Said “love” and meant that too.
I glance at her throat. The red marks from my teeth have faded, almost gone. Soon, there won’t be any trace of them. That bothers my wolf more than it should. When I pulled back in the motel, I told her I needed to be whole first. Certain.
But the man who just conducted Dvo?ák from the driver’s seat of a pickup truck with tears in his throat and music in his chest…that man is closer to whole than I thought I’d be this soon.
She’ll carry my mark. And I’ll carry hers. Maybe sooner than either of us expected.
Right now, somewhere behind us is Aurora, the Syndicate, a woman with a ruined face and ice-blue eyes who no longer scares me. And a man the size of a building hunting a ghost through corridors without leaving a scent.
Ahead is unexplored territory. A truck that doesn’t trace to anywhere. A woman whose hand is warm in mine.
And somewhere underneath the scars and the conditioning and the number they gave me instead of a name…is music.
Quiet. Waiting to give my identity back.
I’m not alone anymore. We’ll find it.
I keep driving.
Excited about Decker’s story? Bearing the Pack, Book 13 in the Dragonblood Dynasty series is coming to on June 30, 2026.