49. Annabella
Chapter forty-nine
Annabella
The SUV smelled like new leather and old magic.
Not Simon’s magic. That was a constant now, a suffocating pressure behind my sternum that had settled in like weather you couldn’t outrun.
This was something else. Residual warding baked into the vehicle’s frame.
Protection spells layered into the door panels, the roof lining, probably the glass.
Whoever had outfitted these vehicles had done it thoroughly and recently, because the magic still carried that sharp, metallic aftertaste that fresh wards left behind.
Vivienne sat in the passenger seat, half-turned so she could watch me. She hadn’t spoken since we’d left the compound, which should have been a mercy but wasn’t. Her silence had a quality to it—expectant, amused—like a cat that had cornered something and was deciding how long to let it twitch.
The witch driving hadn’t looked at me once. Professional. Eyes on the road, hands at ten and two, the posture of someone who’d been told drive and had absolutely no interest in the cargo.
The vehicle slowed. Through the narrow gap between the front seats, I caught the lead vehicle pulling off to the shoulder, the rest of the convoy following in formation.
Vivienne straightened. Looked at Simon.
“We’re ten minutes early,” she said.
Simon didn’t look up from his phone. “If they’re not here, we don’t wait.”
The engine idled. Outside, the forest pressed in on both sides of the road; dense spruce, the kind that swallowed sound and light in equal measure. The convoy sat in a line and waited.
Forty seconds. A minute.
Movement in the tree-line.
Duke first.
My stomach dropped so fast I tasted bile.
He came out of the forest the way he always came out of anywhere: shoulders squared, stride eating ground.
Behind him came Lydia. He’d saved her. He’d gone back. And then a third figure emerged behind them.
The witch with the purple scarf. She was shorter than the other two. Dark-skinned, that purple scarf wound around her neck. Her being here meant that Simon could rebuild. We had set him back by destroying the facility, but with her, it wouldn’t take him long to be up and running again.
Simon pocketed his phone and opened the door. Cold air flooded the cabin.
“Stay,” Vivienne said to me. Like I was a dog.
I watched Simon approach the three figures. Duke stopped three feet from him. Close enough for conversation.
“Sir.”
Lydia came closer. “Simon, I wanted to tell you in person, it was—”
“I know who it was.” He gestured back toward the SUV. Duke and Lydia’s eyes snapped toward me. Duke’s nostrils flared. Lydia smiled, smug that I’d been caught.
“You were on site,” Simon said, drawing their attention back to him. “All three of you. On site. With a full security complement. And a team of six managed to destroy my operation, corrupt my data, and walk out.”
Duke’s jaw clenched.
Lydia’s composure held, but her chin lifted a fraction. “By the time—”
“By the time,” Webster repeated the words like he was tasting something rotten. “I can see that that phrase will do a great deal of heavy lifting in your account, Lydia. By the time. As though you were merely observers. Bystanders to the destruction of years of work.”
Silence.
“Very well. We will proceed to the site, see if anything can be salvaged.”
Simon turned back to the convoy. Duke and Lydia and the purple scarf witch climbed into the second SUV without another word. Simon slid into the seat beside me and pulled the door shut. The convoy rolled forward.
Nobody spoke as the trees thinned. Blackened concrete and collapsed steel emerged from the tree-line like bones breaking through skin. The convoy pulled into a clearing littered with debris—chunks of concrete, twisted metal, ash the wind had spread across the ground in gray drifts.
Simon stepped out and stood, surveying the wreckage.
Vivienne opened my door. “Out.”
My boots crunched on debris as she gripped my arm and steered me forward.
Simon glanced back, nodded once to Vivienne, who released me and stepped away.
Okay, then. Time for a daddy-daughter reunion.
“Walk with me.”
He picked his way through the debris without checking if I was following.
Witches formed up around us,a tight security perimeter that moved when Simon moved. They weren’t looking at the ruins. They were scanning outward. The tree-line. The ridges. Looking for threats.
They’re nervous. I filed that away. Simon’s bodyguard witches didn’t get nervous without reason. Either he’d warned them to expect company, or they’d picked up something on their own.
We walked.
The facility was worse than I’d imagined. We’d been running when it went up, hadn’t stopped to admire our work. Now, in the gray morning light, what was left of Mégantic Agricultural Supply Co. looked like something the earth had tried to swallow.
The barracks was gutted. Roof caved in, walls blackened and leaning at angles that said they’d come down with the next hard wind.
Fire had eaten through from below, up the stairwell, through the ventilation system.
The second building had fared worse. The ground beneath it had partially collapsed, dragging one wall down into the cavity where the underground level used to be.
Through the gap, I could see the edge of the concrete staircase sheared off and hanging over nothing.
Below it, rubble. Twisted metal. Darkness.
Five thousand square feet of research space, carved out of rock, now buried under its own ceiling.
The spell circle. The workstations. The thousands of crates packed with spell boxes, ready to ship. Lydia’s little empire of binding ratios and rowan concentrations. All of it was down there…crushed, burned, buried.
Simon picked his way toward the collapsed section, studying the damage the way a surgeon studied an X-ray. Then I realized he was not studying the destruction but the structure beneath it, where the load-bearing walls had been.
“The access stairwell is impassable,” he said, almost to himself. “But the freight elevator shaft —” He crouched, brushed ash from a section of exposed concrete. Traced something with his finger. “Petra.”
The purple scarf witch was at his side in three seconds. She studied whatever he’d found, then straightened. Nodded once.
“The shaft is intact below the collapse line. If we clear the debris from the loading access on the east side, we could reach the lower vault within the hour.”
“Do it.” Simon stood, brushing dust from his knees. “Take four from the perimeter team. I want to know what survived.”
Petra moved off without a word, already signaling to the other witches.
Simon turned back to the ruins. Hands behind his back. That pose.
“Sloppy,” he said. He nudged a piece of debris with his polished shoe.
“Effective, but sloppy. You relied too heavily on a single incendiary point. The underground space was large enough that the blast pattern was uneven.” He glanced back at me.
“Esme Parker’s work, I assume. She always did have more raw power than finesse. ”
He said it like he used to know her. My eyebrows rose. What the hell did he know about Esme? As far as I knew, she had never been one of his witches.
Simon walked further into the ruins. When I didn’t follow, Duke loomed up behind me and gave me a shove.
“I’m told the servers have been compromised.” Simon glanced back at me. “Everything has been corrupted: local drives, cloud backups. Months of research, and years of refinement.” He sighed. “Without Petra, this would have been catastrophic. The formulas, at least, survive in her head.”
Fuck! We needed to capture Petra and make sure what she knew didn’t get out.
“You’re being unusually quiet, Annabella.”
I shrugged. “Nothing to say.”
“No?” He stopped walking. Turned to face me fully. “That’s unlike you. You always had opinions. Questions. Challenges.” His mouth curved. “I used to find it charming. Your desire to understand everything. To prove yourself.”
The words slid off me. I’d heard this tone before. The nostalgic, almost fond voice he used when he wanted something.
“You were so determined when you first came to me.” He started walking again, slower now. Conversational. “So young, so angry at the world.”
Don’t react. Don’t give him anything.
“I gave you a purpose, didn’t I? Training. The chance to fight back against the Council that had made your life miserable. I taught you to think strategically, to channel your rage into something productive.”
“You used me.”
“I invested in you.” His voice sharpened.
“Do you think those skills appeared from nowhere? Your combat training. Your tactical thinking. Your ability to lead a team. I provided all of that. I saw your potential when no one else did. And this is how you repay me.” He gestured at the ruins around us.
“Sabotage. Theft. Aligning yourself with those who see you as nothing more than a curiosity.”
“Sam doesn’t—”
“The Shaw boy.” Simon’s lip curled. “His entire family serves the same corrupt institution you swore to destroy. And you’ve let him inside your head.”
“He’s not inside my head.”
“The mate bond is inside your head. It’s a biological leash.
Chemical manipulation disguised as romance.
Werewolves use it to control each other, to ensure compliance through artificial attachment.
” He shook his head slowly. “I expected better from you. After everything I taught you about independence and clear thinking.”
Something snarled behind my ribs. Not my wolf, she was still muted and distant behind the silver. Something else. Something that lived in the space between witch and wolf that belonged entirely to me.
“The Pack structure is unstable,” he continued. “And the Three Rivers Pack?” He made a dismissive sound. “A mid-sized territory with delusions of influence. They can’t protect you. They can’t protect Ellie.”
My stomach clenched at my sister’s name. He always knew where to aim.
“But I can protect her.” His voice softened. Almost gentle. “You think you’ve hidden her somewhere I can’t reach? You think a mid-sized Pack with young Alphas are enough to keep my daughter safe?”
My daughter. He said it quietly. Just for me.
“Ellie needs proper guidance,” he continued. “Proper training. Someone who understands what she is and what she’ll become. You’ve left her with wolves who see a charming little girl, not a weapon that hasn’t been activated yet.”
“She’s not a weapon.”
“Everything is a weapon, Annabella. You, of all people, should know that.”
He was right. He’d made me into a weapon. Spent years doing it. Honing my anger, directing my loyalty, pointing me at his enemies, and pulling the trigger. Now he was looking at my four-year-old sister and seeing raw material.
“I made mistakes with you,” Simon said. “I gave you too much freedom. Allowed emotional attachments to form. Let you develop loyalties that competed with mine.” He studied the ruins around us with a calm, evaluating expression.
“With Ellie, I won’t make those errors. She’s young enough to be shaped from the start. ”
Something was happening inside my chest. It was fear, I realized.
Raw, unfiltered fear. The kind that seeped in through the cracks and filled you up until there was no room for anything else.
He was going to take Ellie. He was going to take my sister—bright, fierce, four-year-old Ellie who laughed too loud and loved too hard—and turn her into what he’d tried to turn me into.
“You’ll help with the process, naturally.
” Simon’s tone was conversational. “Once your memories have been properly edited, you’ll serve as an excellent role model of what compliance looks like.
Ellie will grow up watching her big sister obey, and she’ll learn that obedience to me is how things work. ”
My hands were shaking. The silver cuffs rattled against each other, and I couldn’t make them stop.
“Fuck you!”
He sighed. “Well, we might as well get this over with. Your consent isn’t required, Annabella. I thought you might choose to cooperate, for Ellie’s sake, but you’ve demonstrated clearly that you can’t be reasoned with.” He turned from the ruins. Faced me fully. “So we’ll do it the other way.”
I believed him. That was the worst part.
This wasn’t a bluff. This wasn’t leverage designed to make me cooperate.
This was a man who’d decided I was a failed experiment, writing me off and moving to the next iteration.
He wasn’t going to wait for Kansas City, he was going to take my mind apart, strip out Sam and the bond and every piece of who I’d become, and when he was done, I’d smile at him and mean it. And then we’d go for Ellie.
And I couldn’t stop him.
Magic slammed into my mind.
No warning. No buildup. One second I was standing in the ruins, and the next, something was inside my skull, cold and sharp and relentless, tearing through my thoughts like claws through wet paper.
Compliance, the magic whispered. Submit. Surrender. Obey.
I screamed.
Or tried to. My body wasn’t responding. My knees buckled. Duke caught me, and then nothing mattered except the thing burrowing through my head, turning over memories like furniture in a ransacked room.
You are mine, his voice echoed through my skull. You always were. And you will remember that.
I couldn’t breathe. The silver cuffs burned against my wrists as my magic tried to fight back and found nothing.
Simon had been smothering it since the Mountain Pack compound, a steady weight over the flame, and now his attention had shifted.
He was pouring everything into the mental assault; every scrap of focus and power concentrated on cracking me open.
Which meant he wasn’t holding down everything else.
The dampening spell. The one suffocating my magic.
It stuttered.
Just for a second. A hairline fracture in the wall he’d built around me, caused by his own redirected power.
My magic surged toward the crack like water finding a fault line.
Silver-green fire flared beneath my skin, wild and uncontrolled, and for one blazing instant, the wall between me and my wolf thinned to nothing.
SAM.
The mate bond flared. Weak, desperate, reaching out through the fracture before it sealed shut again. A single pulse flung into the dark. No words. Just me. Just everything I was, compressed into a heartbeat’s worth of signal.
I’m here. I’m here. Find me.
Simon’s spell crashed back down. The fracture closed. Silence flooded back in, absolute and suffocating.
But just before it did, somewhere—somewhere beyond the ruins and the ash and the silver—I felt an answer.
Faint. Distant. Unmistakable.
I’m coming.
Then the darkness took me.