Chapter 16 Sable
SABLE
Ireject you.
I couldn’t breathe or move. My ears filled with pressure, like I’d been dragged beneath black water. I surged forward, hands and knees hitting the earth without permission. My spine arched instinctively as if I could dodge the echo still reverberating through my chest.
I was being disassembled.
A part of me was being torn from its roots. And I knew he felt it too.
The bond snapped inside me like a rope fraying one thread at a time, unraveling through the marrow of my bones. My vision blurred. My tears had turned to ash long ago, but this was an internal quake. My wolf let out a noise—part sob, part howl, part static silence. She was hollow.
And Goddess, the silence after. No more hum. No pulse. The quiet replaced them.
I tasted copper on my tongue, and it turned out I’d bitten my lip, hard. My magic recoiled into itself.
He’d done it. He’d severed the bond.
And in that moment, kneeling in a crater of magic and grief, all I wanted was to feel nothing at all. Instead, a wave crashed over me. It burned, turning my core into molten lava.
I fell to my knees as the surroundings faded into nothing. I was aware of movement, of feet running in my direction, while everything else was dulled. Cotton wool over my ears. A hand came to rest in the space between my shoulder blades.
“I’m here, Mama Sabe. It’s okay.”
Astrid’s presence soothed a small part of my being while the rest of me was on fire. I wanted to give in to it, to become one with the earth below me. To let everything drift away and be nothing.
Nothing.
Never before had a sensation so visceral called to me from within—I wanted to die.
My head hit the ground before I knew I was falling.
“Sable!” Astrid screamed and placed her hand behind my head, cradling me like a child, the way I had done with her when I’d first rescued her from the grips of those sick bastards.
“Don’t you give up on me, Sable,” she whispered into my ear, and a melody filled the air.
A gentle tune I knew from my deepest, oldest memories.
My mother.
The melody brought me back from the edge of nothing, anchoring me to memories I’d buried deep. For a moment, I wasn’t lying broken on Orion territory with my soul torn in half. I was small again, safe again, before I understood what it meant to be hunted for what I was.
Before I learned that wanting something could destroy you.
The music wrapped around the raw wound where the bond used to be, not healing it—nothing could do that—but making it bearable enough that I could remember who I was beyond this pain. I was Sable of the Crux. I was an enforcer. I had survived worse than this.
Even if it didn’t feel like it right now.
I let myself stay in that place of memory, back with the woman who had done everything she could, shielding me from the threats every Crux faced.
We were an all-female pack—males who became mates or bonded partners came from other packs—but the Crux line was always dominant in our genes.
Even if we were forcibly removed from the Crux family and assimilated into other packs, we were still Crux first. Magical abilities that came with being Crux made us a target.
Our abilities usually rose up in adolescence but sometimes earlier if we found our wolf young.
I was one of those. I was barely six years old when I had my first shift, the sensation of it as natural as breathing.
It had been in the presence of my mother, who stood in wonder in the little garden she kept behind one of our cabins.
We had many, all of them shared cabins so that any Crux could find a safe place when needed.
We were an underground railroad for our own, recognizing our roots through scent, a scent we kept hidden from all except our pack mates.
That was how we stayed safe.
My mother had taken extra steps to protect me, knowing my uniquely hybrid blood, my father’s lineage, could make me a mark at any moment, particularly for those packs who loved to exploit the valued abilities of a wolf with extra powers.
Mother wasn’t only worried about other packs—she feared the Crux themselves would turn against me if they ever found out who my father was, if they ever found out I was more than a wolf shifter, more than Crux.
I wondered what my mother would have thought of me now, had she lived to see this moment. That fated mates truly still existed. That I had one. That I had manipulated him into hating me so much he rejected me with his very soul.
And I was likely going to die because of it.
Mama Sabe. Astrid spoke to me through the bond, and I could hear her words far clearer than before. This isn’t how your story ends.
A gasp escaped my lips. I wanted to tell her she would be okay, that she could speak to Eve and tell her everything. That I knew Eve would watch over her and bring her into the pack in the way I hadn’t.
Except there was still so much Eve didn’t know.
My wolf whimpered, an invisible dagger cast into her heart, and she was losing life. Fast. I saw the amber of her heart’s blood seeping out, the injury near fatal.
“She’s taken a deep wound.” Anwen’s voice wove through my ears. “The fated mate bond was set in her long ago. Before her birth.”
Anwen’s hands hovered over my face. I was aware my breaths were coming in hurried fits, my body fighting to survive even as my spirit withered.
“The Shadow Moon Goddess wrote it in the stars long ago,” Anwen said.
“You can see her soul stars?” the Orion elder, Raina, asked.
“Mmm,” Anwen replied. “I always had a sense she might be Crux.”
“Crux,” Eve exhaled. “I knew it. I knew she had to be.” Her hand brushed the hair from my face.
The two elders, Astrid, and Eve were huddling close.
Eve leaned in. “Sable, I command you to fight the desire to end your life. I command you to fight to live. There is so much you’ve kept hidden, so much you made me believe about you that I now know is false. ”
She sat back on her knees, and I followed her with my eyes.
“I am your alpha, the high female alpha of Orion, and I command you to live.”
She doesn’t know. The thought rose up, clear as a bell through the muddle of the rejection chaos. She doesn’t know I must follow her command, not because of Orion.
But because she is the next alpha of Crux.
Astrid’s arm slipped behind my shoulders, and she pulled me up with a strength that made my limp body feel like nothing more than a heavy backpack.
"I've got her," Astrid said. She manipulated my body onto her back in a fireman’s carry. I let my eyes flutter shut in the security of her hold. Footsteps approached us quickly. "Back up," she shouted, "I said I've got her." The footsteps backed away slowly.
Astrid carried me through the Orion town, Eve leading the way and the elders behind us.
When I opened my eyes again, we stood before the alpha's cabin.
Even through my exhaustion, the building commanded attention—a massive structure of dark timber and river stone that rose two stories high, its peaked roof cutting sharp angles against the sky.
The logs were thick as ancient tree trunks, fitted together with clean precision, and the stone foundation looked like it had been pulled straight from the mountain itself.
No decorative trim, no unnecessary flourishes.
Just raw materials assembled with such perfect proportions that the simplicity itself became impressive.
My arms slipped slightly on Astrid's shoulders as she adjusted her grip, her chest rising and falling in exaggerated breaths.
“I can walk,” I whispered into her ear. “You’re tired.”
You can’t and I’m not, she said through the Crux bond, and she swallowed a sob. It struck me that her staggered breathing was due to emotion, and not from carrying me. Carrying me was already a feat, since I was close to twice her weight.
Eve stepped in first, then Astrid followed over the threshold of the cabin.
“This way.” Eve led us down a hall that felt like it was longer than the size of the cabin.
In fact, it was.
We entered a tunnel and descended until we arrived in a space that looked half medieval castle, half torture chamber.
“Lay her on the bed.” Eve pointed to a corner where a four-poster bed was made up with lush fabrics.
The softness of the mattress welcomed me as Astrid set me down.
Eve sat beside me, fluffing the pillows and lifting my head to set an extra cushion underneath.
I watched it all happen like I was having an out-of-body experience.
I could breathe again. My brain slowly caught up with the present. Questions flooded me.
A jolt ran through me when I remembered Rhys’s face after he declared the rejection. “Where is he? Where’s Rhys?”
“He ran into the forest,” Eve said, moving locks of hair from my sweaty forehead. “Don’t you worry about him right now. You almost died.”
My breath hitched. I almost died. The enforcer of the Crux pack, with a long list of wolves who still needed me, and I almost died well before my work was done.
Because of the bond rejection.
Shit.
“I see you’re realizing what happened,” Eve said as she placed her fingertips on my wrist. “Your heartbeat is out of control. Calm down, or we’re going to face a new crisis, and frankly, we have a lot to cover.”
Shit, shit, shit.
The shock of everything was drawing a dark curtain over my eyes. Eve’s voice wove into me just as my head started spinning.
“Don’t you pass out now.” She stood up from the bed. “You’re going to tell me exactly who you are, who I am, and why in the name of the Shadow Moon Goddess you made me think you hated me.”
The world went black.