45. Annabella
Chapter forty-five
Annabella
I’d been working on the cuffs for what felt like hours.
Pressing my fingertips against the silver threading, pushing my witch magic into the burn, holding it there until my vision blurred and my arms shook. Then pulling back. Breathing. Trying again.
Each time, the crack widened a fraction. Each time, my magic held a little longer.
Slow progress. But progress.
My wolf paced in the back of my mind, restless and muffled.
She wanted out. Wanted to run, to fight, to tear through these walls and disappear into the forest beyond the window.
I understood the impulse. Respected it, even.
But running blind through Mountain Pack territory in winter with healing ribs and half-functioning magic was a death sentence, and I hadn’t survived Adarcan to freeze to death in Quebec.
Think. Use your head.
I sat on the edge of the bed and went through it again.
The Meute des Montagnes was getting medicine from Webster.
Monthly doses for their Alpha. Whatever the Alpha had, it was bad enough to terrify a Pack of backcountry wolves into guarding a ripple facility.
Marise’s reaction when I’d mentioned the doses—that flash of stillness, the whole room snapping to attention—told me everything I needed to know about how desperate they were.
Desperate people made dangerous decisions.
The question was whether their desperation could be turned. If I could make them see that Webster’s deal was a cage, not a lifeline, I might —
Footsteps in the hallway. Multiple sets. Moving with purpose.
I stood, positioning myself with my back to the far wall. The lock clicked.
Marise filled the doorway. She looked worse than before, her braid looser, shadows carved deeper under her eyes.
Behind her stood the goatee guy and an older woman.
Gray-streaked hair pulled into a knot, deep lines bracketing around her mouth, the bearing of someone who’d been giving orders since before I was born.
“Come with me,” Marise said. No preamble. No explanation.
“Where?”
“The Alpha wants to see you.”
That stopped me. I’d expected more interrogation. More of Marise’s rapid-fire questions designed to shake loose information.
“A personal summons.” I kept my voice level. “Should I curtsy, or is a nod sufficient?”
Marise didn’t respond. Just turned and walked.
The older woman fell in beside me, close enough that her shoulder nearly brushed mine. The goatee guy and another wolf bracketed us from behind.
The scent of the house wrapped around me as we walked. Woodsmoke and pine resin and the layered musk of Pack. Dozens of individual wolves woven together into something collective. Something that said belonging in a language my wolf understood.
We stopped at a door at the far end of the second floor. Larger than the others. The wood was darker, older, carved with symbols I didn’t recognize. Some kind of Pack tradition, maybe. Generations of meaning I had no context for.
Marise paused with her hand on the handle.
“She tires quickly,” she said, and for a second, the mask slipped and I saw the concern underneath the soldier. “Be brief.”
She opened the door.
The smell hit me like a wall.
My wolf lurched backward inside my chest. Because the scent in this room went beyond sickness, beyond fever sweat and the medicinal bite of herbs. It was acrid. Burned. Like something electrical had short-circuited inside a living body.
And beneath the burn—threading through it, inseparable from it—the sweet-rot edge of decay. The body eating itself from the inside out. Two things that shouldn’t exist together. Electricity and rot. Fire and slow ruin.
The room spun.
And I knew it. It was the same scent that had replaced the cinnamon and lavender in my mother’s bedroom.
The same wrongness that had crept in over months and years until the woman who’d smelled like fresh laundry and home had the same acrid, burned edge that had made me press my face into my mother’s pillow one night and realize the scent I’d grown up breathing was gone.
The woman in the bed was maybe fifty. She’d been striking once.
I could see it in the bone structure, but the illness had hollowed her out.
Her skin had a grayish cast. Her dark hair was thin and brittle against the pillow.
The veins in her hands and forearms were too visible, running dark against papery skin.
Even ravaged by illness, the resemblance was unmistakable. The same bone structure. The same sharp cheekbones and slightly-too-large oval eyes. I glanced at Marise.
Her mother. The Alpha is her mother.
An older man sat beside her, holding her hand.
Weathered face, deep-set eyes, the kind of stillness that came from sitting in one place for too long.
He had the build of a wolf who’d once been formidable—broad through the chest, thick forearms—but something had caved in behind it.
Like the scaffolding was still up but the structure had given way.
He looked up when we entered, and his expression shuttered immediately. Protective. His body angled toward the woman in the bed, putting himself between her and me—an instinct so automatic I doubted he was even aware of it.
“So,” the woman said. Her voice was rough, each word costing effort, but authority lived in it still. “You’re the one who burned down Webster’s pretty laboratory.”
I couldn’t answer.
The room was spinning, and my wolf was pressing against the cage the silver had built, whimpering, because she knew too. We both knew. The scent was the same. Not similar. Not overlapping. The same.
“How long?” The words came out wrong. Smaller than I intended. Younger.
The woman in the bed studied me. Whatever she’d expected from the prisoner who’d destroyed Webster’s operation, it wasn’t this.
“Three years,” she said. “It came on slowly. Webster said it was —”
“A rare condition.” The words fell out of me before I could stop them. “Unpredictable progression. He told you he was managing it. Stabilizing it. Said the treatments were the only thing standing between you and —”
I stopped. Swallowed hard. Tried to get my voice under control.
“He said all of that, didn’t he?”
The room went very quiet.
Marise stepped forward. “How do you know that?”
I looked at her. At the exhaustion and the fear and the fierce, desperate love she was barely keeping leashed behind that controlled exterior. And I recognized every single piece of it, because I had worn that exact expression for years while I watched my mother waste away.
“Because he’s doing it to my mother too.”
Nobody moved.
Marise’s composure didn’t crack dramatically; she wasn’t the type. It was more like a fracture running through stone. Her lips parted. Her hand found the doorframe.
The woman’s eyes hadn’t left my face. Dark. Intelligent. Absolutely lucid despite the body failing around her.
“Sit down,” she said.
“Maman—” Marise started.
“Sit. Down.” Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. “Both of you.”
I sat.
Marise didn’t. She stayed by the doorframe, arms folded, jaw tight. But she stopped arguing.
“My name is érene Laroche,” the woman said. She gestured toward the man beside her. “My mate and co-Alpha, Mathis. Now, tell me everything.”
I looked at érene—at the tremors in her hands, at the shallow breathing, at the way her eyelids kept wanting to close but she forced them open through sheer will—and I told her.
“My mother started getting sick right after she began questioning Webster’s operations. She’d confided in me that she thought he was manipulating alliances between covens and Shifters. Playing both sides, keeping tensions high instead of working for peace.”
Mathis shifted in his chair. His grip on érene’s hand tightened.
“Weeks later, the headaches started. Then seizures. Then she couldn’t hold a Shift.
Her wolf just… faded. Like someone was turning the volume down on her, month by month.
We ran tests, went to healers. Then Webster suggested he have a look.
He told us he had medicine that could manage her symptoms. Monthly doses.
They keep her stable, but they don’t heal her. ”
Mathis exchanged a look with Marise.
“About three and a half years ago,” Marise said carefully. “An intermediary came here. Asked about facility access and territory protection. We refused.”
“And after that, érene got sick?”
I wanted them to say no, to say that she was sick before. Because if not, that would mean my father had done this. He had made my mom sick.
Silence.
Mathis stood. “What are you saying?” His voice was barely controlled.
I shook my head, even as I felt nausea rising in my stomach.
“I’m saying it’s the same smell.” I pointed at érene, at the bed, at the room.
“My mother’s bedroom smells exactly like this.
Not similar. Identical. Three years of watching her deteriorate, three years of being told it’s rare and unpredictable and we should be grateful he’s helping.
” My voice cracked on the last word. I didn’t try to hide it.
“My mother questioned him and got sick. You refused him, and your Alpha got sick. It’s not a coincidence. ”
“You can’t prove that.”
“No,” I agreed. “But if I’m right, he creates the illness.
Then he offers the cure. But the cure isn’t a cure.
It’s a leash. Just enough medicine to keep you alive, to keep you dependent, to keep you so fucking terrified of losing her that you’ll guard his facilities, protect his operations, hand over prisoners when he asks in exchange for the doses he provides.
What do you think will happen when you stop being useful? ”
“Mathis,” érene said.
The older man turned to his mate.
“We refused him,” érene whispered.
“Yes.”
“And then I got ill. He offered his medicine to keep me alive, in exchange for us changing our minds.”
“Yes.”
érene closed her eyes. Mathis sank back into his chair. He didn’t let go of érene’s hand, but I could see the shaking in his arms.
“Maybe you’re right,” Mathis said. “Maybe Webster engineered this. Maybe he poisoned érene. Maybe everything you’re saying is true. Do you have a cure for it?”
I shook my head.
“No. No one does, except maybe Webster. So right now, the only thing keeping her alive is the medicine he sends. And you burned the facility we were protecting in exchange for those doses.”
Shit. I knew how they felt. We’d had to get Mom out of Ashridge, but Aunt Jo had taken at least three months’ worth of medicine with them. I’d gambled Mom’s life on Thomas, on the bet that he could reverse engineer the medicine or work out what was really wrong with her.
“You expect me to risk her life on a stranger’s story? We don’t have that luxury. We have a dying Alpha. We have doses that run out in days. And we have a Pack that needs its leader.”
He came closer. I could see the devastation in every line of his face. The exhaustion and the fear and the love that was eating him alive.
“Believe you or not, it doesn’t matter. Unless Webster gives us more medicine, érene dies. And now the facility is gone, the only leverage we have left is you.”
I looked at érene. At Mathis and Marise.
They weren’t villains. They were pawns. Desperate, terrified pawns in a game Webster had been playing for years.
The same game he’d played with me.
“If you hand me over to him,” I said quietly, meeting Mathis’s eyes, “you will never get free. He will let érene die the moment you stop being useful. You’ll be trapped in this cycle forever. One missed dose away from losing everything.”
Mathis flinched. Because he knew. Somewhere beneath the desperation, he already knew.
“He’s holding her life hostage to control you. That’s what he does. Create dependence. Maintain control. And the second you’re not worth the cost of the medicine, he’ll pull it.”
“We don’t have a choice.” Marise’s voice was taut as wire.
“There’s always a choice.”
“Not when the alternative is watching my mother die.” Marise’s composure finally broke—just for a second.
Pain flashed across her face, unguarded and searing, and I thought: I know.
Spirits take it, I know. “Webster has been contacted about his facility. He’s sending someone.
They will arrive in a couple of hours. In exchange for one of those who burned it down, he guarantees six months of medicine. ”
Well, wasn’t that just dandy? I was out of time and ideas.
“Six months,” I repeated. “And then what?”
“Six months is six months my mother stays alive.” Her voice was flat. Final.
Mathis returned to his mate’s side. Sat heavily. Took érene’s trembling hand in both of his and brought it to his lips.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I didn’t know if he was talking to me or to her.