47. Annabella
Chapter forty-seven
Annabella
The lock clicked.
I’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, pressing my magic into the silver threading of the cuffs for the hundredth time, feeling the hairline fracture I’d been widening. Almost there.
The door banged open.
Marise stood in the hallway with four wolves behind her. Not two. Four. And the look on her face wasn’t the controlled tension I’d seen before. This was white-knuckled dread, pulled so tight across her features that her skin looked like paper stretched over glass.
“Get up.”
My wolf stirred behind the silver, sluggish but alert. Something was wrong. Something beyond the already-wrong of being a prisoner in a mountain Pack’s Alpha House waiting for Simon’s people to show up and claim me like lost luggage.
Two of the wolves stepped in and grabbed my arms. Harder than before. The silver cuffs bit into the raw skin of my wrists, and I swallowed a hiss.
“Downstairs,” Marise said. “Now.”
They’re here, I thought. Whoever Simon sent. They’re here.
I’d run the scenarios. Best case: some mid-level coven operative I could manipulate.
Someone who didn’t know me, didn’t know my capabilities, someone I could outmaneuvre on the road before we reached wherever they planned to take me.
Worst case: Vivienne or Lydia, sent with enough backup to make escape a fantasy.
They marched me through the hallway, past the family photos and carved wooden totems, past a window where gray light filtered through the glass.
The house felt different. Tighter. The normal sounds of a Pack compound—movement, conversation, the clattering warmth of people sharing a space—were gone. Replaced by a suffocating quiet.
My stomach clenched.
They’re nervous. Hexing hell, who did Simon send?
My body knew before my brain caught up. It was the scent: dry cement with a hint of lemon. The hallway tilted as my magic slammed against the silver cuffs so hard that green sparks crackled across the metal, and one of the guards next to me flinched.
No. No, no, no—
Marise glanced back at me. Saw my face. Regret flickered in her eyes.
“You said he was sending someone.”
Marise’s jaw worked. She didn’t answer, and that was answer enough.
He’d come himself. Because what he’d lost in his ripple facility was significant enough to warrant his personal attention.
Howling hell.
My feet felt leaden as I descended the stairs. The scent grew stronger with every step, cement dust and lemon saturating the air, coating the back of my throat.
Simon stood in the center of the room. Hands clasped behind his back. Examining the maps on the central table like he was browsing art at a gallery.
Everything inside me collapsed inward.
Fear and rage, all tangled together, surged up inside me.
And something worse: a gravitational pull so strong it made me dizzy.
My body wanted to go to him. Five years of conditioning, five years of “Yes, Simon” and “I won’t let you down” and “Please be proud of me”—all of it clawing up through my chest, and I hated myself for it so violently I ground my teeth till I thought they’d crack.
Webster turned, and his mask cracked. A raw, unscripted break that lasted less than a heartbeat before the composure slammed back down. He hadn’t known I was here.
His magic rolled outward like a cold tide. Heavy. Suffocating. Settling over my magic the way the silver cuffs had settled over my wolf. He was blocking any ability I had to cast.
I looked at his face, and all the emotions that had been swelling up inside snuffed out in a blink.
The only thing left was grief. Not for him.
For the man I’d invented. The father who’d found a starving girl in a Pack that hated her and said, “Come with me, I see you, you’re not broken, you’re extraordinary.
” That man had never existed. But I was mourning him, and I wanted to scream at my own heart for being so pathetically, unforgivably stupid.
I had believed everything that came out of his mouth.
Had built my whole life around his goals.
Killed for him. Gone to prison for him. And he’d let me, because I was useful.
The shame of it was so hot I thought it might actually burn through my skin.
“Well, this is awkward. I was expecting middle management. Maybe an intern. Definitely not the CEO making a house call.”
His jaw tightened. Just barely. “Annabella.”
“Simon.” I matched his tone. Flat. Controlled. “Fancy meeting you here. In Quebec. At a Pack compound where you’ve been poisoning the Alpha. Small world.”
That landed, I saw it in the minute tightening around his eyes.
Mathis made a strangled noise from somewhere near the fireplace.
“I was told that the saboteurs who destroyed my facility were a rogue tactical unit. I am disappointed, Annabella. You’ve allowed yourself to be misdirected.”
There it was. That tone. The one I’d learned to dread before I understood why—quiet disappointment that said I’d failed him again.
Six months ago, I’d have done anything to make that disappointment go away. Worked harder. Pushed further. Swallowed every doubt and thrown myself back into his mission until he looked at me and saw something worth keeping again.
But fuck that. Fuck him. I wasn’t a teenager anymore, desperate for scraps of approval from a father who’d never planned to give them.
“Wow,” I said brightly. “Straight to the emotional manipulation. No warm-up questions? No ‘how was prison, sweetheart?’ You’re just speedrunning to the psychological abuse today.”
Something flickered across his face. Gone too fast to name.
He didn’t respond. Just began to circle me. Slow. Unhurried. The way he moved through every room—like the walls existed to frame him. His magic reached out, cold and clinical, brushing against my defences with all the warmth of a scalpel.
I held still. Let him probe. Let him think he was in control of this.
“Your wolf presence has intensified.” He said it the way he’d note a change in the weather.
“Interesting. And your magic—” Another probe, sharper this time.
Light crackled along the cuffs on my wrists.
“—flares chaotically when you’re distressed.
Tut tut. What did I tell you about letting your emotions rule your decisions? We’ll need to address that.”
We. Like I was a project. A thesis paper with some rough drafts that needed editing.
His magic pressed deeper, and I felt the exact moment he found it, the golden thread of warmth woven through my being. The mate bond.
Simon’s expression didn’t change, but something shifted behind his eyes. “And there it is. The problem.”
“The problem?” I said. “What? Someone cares about me without wanting something in return? How inconvenient for you.”
He ignored the jab completely. Which was always worse than anger. Anger meant I’d gotten under his skin. Silence meant I wasn’t even worth acknowledging.
“He’s made you reckless.” Simon stopped his circling, standing directly in front of me now. Close enough that I could see the threads of silver in his perfectly styled hair. “Emotional attachments weaken you, Annabella. They always have. Your mother and sister were proof enough of that.”
Something cold slid into place behind my ribs.
He hadn’t just made Mom sick because she’d asked questions.
He’d made her sick because she was competition.
Her and Ellie…the only two people I would have chosen over him.
So he’d taken them off the board. Slowly.
Carefully. Made me watch my mother fade and believe it was fate instead of strategy.
“You wouldn’t understand. You’ve never loved anything that couldn’t benefit you.”
“Love.” He said the word like it was a disease.
“Is that what you think this is? A fairy tale bond that will save you from your own poor decisions?” He leaned closer, and his voice dropped to something almost gentle.
Almost paternal. “Your mother will deteriorate without my medicine. You know that. Within weeks, she’ll forget Ellie’s face.
Within months, she’ll forget her own name. ”
I shook my head. “No. She’s with a proper doctor now. They’ll work out whatever you did to her. They’ll find a cure.”
Simon shrugged. “Most unlikely. However, that is irrelevant. You need to be reset, Annabella. Recalibrated. It’s the kindest option.”
Recalibrated.
I knew what that meant. Memory tampering.
Carving out pieces of my mind until I fit back into the shape he wanted.
Until Sam was just a stranger. Until the mate bond was just a strange ache I couldn’t explain.
Until I was his obedient weapon again, grateful for whatever crumbs of affection he chose to throw my way.
“You’re not touching my mind.” My voice came out low. Rough. Barely recognizable.
“Your mind is my work.” Patient. Indulgent. “Mine to do with whatever I please.”
My magic snarled beneath my skin, fire trying to catch, to burn, to do something. But Simon’s dampening spell pressed down like a hand over a flame.
Damn it, I had to think clearly, had to come up with a plan.
He turned, dismissing me completely. “Prepare the prisoner for transport.”
Hands gripped my arms, and pulled me toward the door, and for the first time since Simon had arrived, fear crawled up my spine.
Real fear. Not the sharp, useful kind that sharpened your senses and kept you alive.
The slow kind. The kind that seeped in and settled and whispered “There’s no way out of this one. ”
No. Think, think, think. I had to think of a way out.
But the cuffs were blocking my wolf. Simon was smothering my magic. I had nothing. No power, no plan, no way out. And if he carried out his threat, if he got inside my head and started pulling threads…I wouldn’t even know what I’d lost.
I reached for Sam. Desperate, clumsy, throwing everything I had left toward that golden thread the way you’d reach for a hand in the dark.
Nothing.
Just silver and silence and Simon’s magic pressing down like earth on a coffin lid.
For the first time since the bond had sparked to life between us, I couldn’t feel him at all.