Chapter 14
SABLE
Glass was still falling.
Tink, tink, tink.
Fragments skittered across the wooden floor, the remnants catching the light. Little slivers of regret.
The enforcers rushed in.
“Get out!” Rhys shouted with enough command to make them submit. They stood outside the door.
The silver was embedded deep in Rhys—thin, jagged slivers no longer than a fingertip, each one glinting as it caught the sun. Their angles were sharp and precise, like they belonged in a ritual circle, not in someone’s chest.
My fingers still hung in the air, half-curled from the motion of attacking him, while my chest rose and fell like I’d sprinted the Heraclid cliffs end to end.
Rhys was on his back on the floor. Limbs splayed. Breathing fast but steady. The shock in his body hadn’t yet worn off. His pulse beat strongly. He wasn’t dying.
Good.
I hadn’t wanted to kill him, but there was no way I could let him look at me that way, like he was going to fix me. Much less claim me. I could not for one second allow him to think this bond was fated.
And yet, as he’d stood there looking at me with warm eyes, my wolf had gone quiet. No pacing. No snapping at my ribs like she usually did. She’d gone still the way a child hushes at the end of a great storm.
The bond had pulsed beneath my skin. Like a whisper in the dark. Familiar.
I swallowed hard and shut the thoughts down. Locked them behind the same mental doors I’d slammed closed so many times before.
I stepped over to him, silver shards crunching softly underfoot.
The air was thick with the metallic scent of blood and magic as I knelt beside him, the hard floor beneath my knees. Rhys’s breathing came in short bursts, hoarse and ragged. His shirt clung to him, blood-soaked. Crimson bloomed across the torn cotton like ink spilled on a map.
Alive. Unmoving.
The scent of his blood hit me again.
Shit.
My own blood cooled, a stilling that came from the part of me I’d inherited from older, darker bloodlines. It rose in me, that wretched legacy I could never leave behind.
Observe. Wait. Control.
I took one step forward, then stopped. The wind shifted. His scent shifted with it.
The silver had embedded itself just beneath the skin, a glittering constellation of punishment across his chest. He would be feeling heat, pressure, a dull throb that echoed into the marrow of his bones.
Maybe I should have done it to myself, to help me stand up to the constant throbbing of our bond so I could do what I had to do.
Sever our bond forever, get him to reject me.
But this was working in my favor. I could make him hate me.
His eyes met mine.
“Going to finish me off?” he rasped.
“I’m going to undo the damage before you die from it,” I said quietly, and reached out.
I opened his shirt to remove the rest of the splinters of silver, and was met by the seeping series of slashes, the wounds I’d inflicted on him the night of the bonfire, which should have healed.
My fingers hovered over the tiny silver pieces that encircled the slashes on his chest. I crouched at his side and waved my hands over his chest. First too close, then not close enough. A breath passed between us.
“You threw the silver,” he wheezed, his lips twitching in something like a smile. “But now you’re playing healer.”
“I didn’t throw it. I let it go.”
“Same thing.”
“No.” I met his gaze without flinching. “It isn’t. And you were threatening me.”
“Is that what you thought I was doing? Threatening you?”
Threatening me with a bond to a soulless wolf.
I hovered my hand near his neck, the magic pulling a small piece of silver from the edge of his collarbone, but I let it cut a few layers of skin on its way back to form my ring. He sucked in a breath, his back arching just barely off the ground. My palm pressed into his sternum.
His heartbeat thundered under my touch.
“Don’t move,” I said.
“Don’t tease,” he shot back, then winced.
I felt his pain.
My wolf stirred in quiet discontent, wanting to soothe him even as my magic wanted to punish.
“You should’ve stayed away,” I muttered, fingers glowing faintly. The silver shavings hummed as I coaxed them from his skin, though some were stubborn and wouldn’t lift. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I know enough.” His voice became softer. “I know you feel it.”
I didn’t answer. Because I did.
The bond was quiet, low and slow like a river winding around stone. An insistent invitation, one I’d been pushing against since the moment he pinned me in the forest.
“I don’t want this,” I said, more to myself than him.
“But it wants us.”
I leaned closer, hand resting at the base of his ribs to work another shard loose. His breath hitched.
The air shifted. Boots hit the ground, voices sounded in the distance. Likely the rest of them coming to back up their beta. Logan, Eve, and from the number of feet, the whole Orion inner circle.
All I could hear was the sound of Rhys’s heart stuttering under my palm.
One beat. Another.
“You think this is about fate?” I said, bitterness slipping out. “You think the Goddess chose me for you? That this is divine intervention?”
He didn’t answer. I heard his thoughts, just like in the cabin.
The Goddess wants to make things right. To fix what was broken. You and me. Them. All of it. His words came through a damned bond we shouldn’t have had.
His words reached me again, as if I were in his mind.
We’ve been bonded because she can bring me to the twins through you. We are meant to be for that greater purpose. I can’t fight it, but I can use it.
A flicker of something painful cracked through me. The pain of his loss. He thought I was the way back to them.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I won’t lead you to them.”
“You’re the one who showed me they’re still alive.” He coughed. “That has to be what all this shit is about, why you’ve appeared now, why I can’t help but—”
I silenced him with a press of my hand to his chest, fingers splayed wide over his wounds, magic pulsing warm through his skin. He winced, the breath knocked out of him.
I was sure my touch would close the wounds, but the silver magic pulsing through my fingertips didn’t have any effect.
The wounds didn’t heal. If I’d ever needed a sign that this bond was false—and I didn’t need it, though it helped—this was it.
We weren’t meant to be. Never. And I needed him to see that now.
“Look at me,” I said.
He did.
I leaned down, close enough that his breath ghosted across my cheek. My mouth hovered near his ear, and his heartbeat stuttered beneath my hand.
“Let go of the fairy tale,” I whispered. “You’ll never see them again.”
He tried to lift his head, but he was too weak. “You can’t know that. You don’t know that.”
I brushed the back of my fingers down his jaw as footsteps outside came closer. His stubble scraped my skin.
He looked at me like he still believed I could be something good, and that was the last straw.
With a cruel smile I found somewhere deep within me, I leaned in close to his ear.
This was my chance. He was vulnerable. I could rely on the dark side of my soul to lie and make him believe me, the part that was not wolf, the part able to fool him.
“Oh, I know.” My lips grazed his ear before I spoke the lie that would bring this sham to an end. “I know because I killed them.”