POV: Sable
I did not sleep. Not one second.
Every time I closed my eyes, I heard Marlowe's voice on that phone call, playing on repeat like a broken record. Kept it locked down her whole life. I had sat in the dark for hours, turning those words over and over in my mind, trying to make them make sense. But every time I got close to understanding something, my brain hit a wall. Like there was a door inside my own head that I was not allowed to open.
By the time the first grey light crept through my window, I had made a decision. I was not going to cry. I was not going to beg. And I was not going to let Marlowe see me break.
When I walked downstairs at seven in the morning, he was already gone. No note. No goodbye. Just an empty whiskey glass on the table and the faint smell of cigarette smoke hanging in the air like a ghost.
The black car was already waiting outside.
The driver was a big man with a shaved head and no expression on his face. He did not say hello. He did not open the door for me. He just looked at me, then looked at the back seat, and waited. I walked past him, opened the door myself, and climbed in with my bag. I was not going to let anyone open doors for me ever again. Not today.
The car pulled away, and I watched Marlowe's house shrink in the back window. He did not come outside. Did not wave. Did not even look through the curtains. It was like I had already stopped existing to him.
Maybe I had stopped existing to him a long time ago.
I turned away from the window and stared at my hands in my lap. The same hands. The same ordinary skin. But Marlowe's words would not leave me alone. She thinks she is just a regular girl. What did he know that I did not? What had those green pills been doing to me every single day for seventeen years?
I pulled out my phone and tried to search for answers. No signal. Not even one bar. I held it up near the window, but nothing. The trees outside were getting thicker and taller with every minute, swallowing the sky piece by piece until the sunlight was almost gone, even though it was the middle of the morning.
I tried to talk to the driver. "Where are we going?" Nothing. "How far away is it?" Nothing. "Can you at least tell me the man's name?" He did not even blink.
It was like talking to a wall. A wall that drove a car.
One hour passed. Then two. Then three. The road got narrower. The trees got older — massive and twisted, with roots that crawled across the ground like fingers. The air inside the car felt heavier with every mile, like the forest itself was pressing against the windows, trying to get in.
And then something strange happened.
I smelled something.
Not like normal smelling — not something close by, like the leather of the car seat or the driver's cologne. This was different. It was coming from far away, from somewhere deep inside those woods. Pine and wet earth and something else — something warm and alive that I had never smelled before. It hit me so hard and so fast that I actually gasped out loud.
The driver glanced at me in the mirror. Just for one second. And in that one second, something flickered in his eyes. Not surprise. Not concern.
Recognition.
He had heard me gasp. And he was not surprised by it at all.
My stomach dropped.
Before I could think about what that meant, the car slowed down and stopped. Through the windshield, I saw tall iron gates and a mansion beyond them, dark and heavy against the grey sky. Guards stood on either side of the entrance — four of them, all built like soldiers, all watching the car with sharp, focused eyes.
The driver turned off the engine. He finally spoke. His voice was deep and flat, like gravel being poured into a bucket.
"Out."
I grabbed my bag and opened the door myself. The air hit me the moment I stepped out — thick and cold and alive, like breathing something I had never breathed before. Every sound in the forest suddenly had a volume and a direction. Birds. Wind. The guards' heartbeats. I could hear their heartbeats.
I froze.
That was not possible. You cannot hear someone's heartbeat from thirty feet away. Nobody can.
One of the guards stepped forward and looked down at me. His eyes were not normal. They were too bright, too sharp, catching the light in a way that made them look almost golden.
"Welcome to Ironpaw," he said.
And somewhere inside the mansion, behind a window on the top floor, a curtain moved.
Someone was already watching me.