POV: Caspian
I felt her pain at 2:47 in the morning.
It hit me like a fist to the chest — sudden, sharp, and so deep it stole the air from my lungs. I was sitting on the roof of the east wing, legs dangling over the edge, staring at the full moon and trying to quiet my wolf down enough to think. And then it happened. A wave of something that was not mine crashed through me — grief and shame and fury all tangled together, so raw and so real that for a second I could not tell where my feelings ended and hers began.
Sable.
I gripped the edge of the roof until my fingers ached. The bond. The mate bond was doing this — pulling her emotions into me whether I wanted them or not. And what I felt from her right now was not just sadness.
It was devastation.
I closed my eyes and breathed through it, trying to block it out, trying to build a wall between her pain and mine. But the bond was too new, too strong, too hungry to be silenced. Every feeling she had was bleeding straight into me like water through cracks in a dam.
And underneath all the pain, there was something else. Something that had not been there before.
Fury.
Not the quiet, helpless kind. The deep kind. The kind that does not burn out fast — the kind that builds, slow and steady, until it becomes something unbreakable. I recognized it because I carried the same kind inside me. The kind of anger that does not scream. It just waits.
I opened my eyes and stared at the moon. It was huge tonight — fat and bright and impossible to look away from. The full moon always made my wolf stronger, louder, harder to control. Tonight it was almost unbearable. My wolf was pacing inside me like a caged animal, every muscle tense, every instinct screaming the same thing it had been screaming since the woods.
Go to her. Protect her. She is yours.
"She is not mine," I said out loud, into the dark, into the wind. "She belongs to him."
My wolf did not care. My wolf had never cared about what belonged to whom. My wolf only understood one thing: the bond. And the bond said Sable was mine — had always been mine, from the moment the Moon Goddess placed her soul next to my soul at the very beginning of everything.
Pack law said otherwise. My father said otherwise. Everything I had been taught since I was a child said otherwise.
But the Moon Goddess does not make mistakes.
I had learned that young. My mother taught me. She was the one who told me about true mates — about how the bond was sacred, unbreakable, chosen by the goddess herself. She said it with so much certainty that I never questioned it. My mother had been a Luna — the most powerful kind of wolf. Her bond with my father had been real, once. Before Garrick changed. Before power made him into something cold and hollow.
My mother died when I was fifteen. Not from illness. Not from an accident. From heartbreak — the kind that happens when a Luna's bond to her Alpha is destroyed from the inside. When the Alpha stops loving her. When he turns away. The bond does not break cleanly. It tears. And when it tears, it takes pieces of the Luna with it.
I watched it happen. Slowly, over months, I watched my mother fade. Watched the light leave her eyes. Watched her get thinner and quieter and more lost, until one morning she simply did not wake up.
My father did not cry at her funeral.
That was the day I understood what Garrick Ravenclaw truly was. Not just cold. Not just ruthless. He was capable of destroying the one person the Moon Goddess had given him to love, and feel nothing about it.
And now he had done the same thing again. Brought another woman into this house. Claimed her. Used her. And did not care what it was doing to her.
The wave of Sable's pain hit me again — smaller this time, fading, like she was pushing it down, forcing it into a box inside herself. I felt the moment she did it. Felt the wall go up inside her mind, brick by brick, fast and deliberate. She was not going to break. She was not going to let him see her break.
I respected that. More than respected it. It made something in my chest ache with a feeling I did not want to name.
I sat on that roof for another hour, watching the moon move across the sky, listening to the forest breathe below me. My wolf slowly, grudgingly, settled. Not calm — never calm anymore. But quieter. Waiting.
I was about to climb down when Dimitri's voice came through the pack bond again. Not words this time. An image. A feeling. A location.
Garrick's study. Elder Moran. Still there. They stopped writing. They are talking now.
I closed my eyes and focused, trying to catch fragments of what was being said. The pack bond did not carry words well over distance — only emotions and images. But I caught one thing. One word, pushed through the bond by Dimitri with as much force as he could manage.
Tonight.
My eyes flew open.
Tonight. Not days from now. Not next week. Tonight. Garrick and Elder Moran were not just planning the binding ritual. They were planning to do it tonight.
But that was not possible. The ritual required the full moon — and tonight was the full moon.
I looked up at the sky. The moon stared back at me, fat and bright and indifferent.
Tonight.
I jumped off the roof.
I hit the ground running, shifting halfway there — not fully, not all the way, just enough to make my legs faster and my body stronger. I burst through the back door of the mansion and sprinted down the hallway toward Sable's room. My wolf was no longer pacing. It was fully awake now, fully alert, every instinct fired and locked on one single point.
I had to get to her. Right now. Before Garrick did.
I rounded the corner toward her bedroom and skidded to a stop.
The door was open.
Not just open. Broken. The lock was shattered, the wood splintered inward like something had hit it from the inside with tremendous force.
I stepped through the doorway slowly. The room was dark. Empty. The bed was unmade. The window was open, letting in the cold night air and the smell of the forest.
And on the floor, right in the middle of the room, was something that made my blood turn to ice.
Claw marks.
Not on the furniture. Not on the walls. On the floor. Four long, deep scratches carved into the wood, like something powerful had been trying to hold on — trying to stay in place — while something else inside it was trying to break free.
And next to the claw marks, pressed into the dust on the floor like a stamp, was a single handprint.
Sable's handprint.
But the fingers were wrong.
They were longer than they should have been. Thicker. And at the tips, where the nails should have been, the marks were sharp and curved and deep.
Not human nails.
Wolf nails.
She had started to shift.