POV: Sable
I hid the claw marks before dawn.
I found them when I woke up — four long scratches gouged into the wooden floor right beside my bed, deep enough that the wood underneath was white and raw. My hands were shaking when I knelt down to look at them. I remembered nothing. No pain. No sound. Just a dream about running, and then waking up with dirt under my nails and my chest burning like someone had poured fire into it.
I covered them with the edge of the bedsheet and pushed the rug over the rest. It was not perfect — anyone looking closely would see the damage. But Garrick never came into this room in the morning. He was gone before I woke up, off doing whatever it was that kept the pack running. And Thalia only checked on me once a day, usually in the afternoon.
I had until then to figure out what was happening to me.
But first, I needed to eat. I had not eaten properly in days — not because there was no food, but because every meal with Garrick made my stomach twist into knots. So I decided to find another way.
The kitchen was at the back of the mansion, down a narrow hallway that smelled like old wood and something warm and sweet — bread baking, maybe. The door was open. I stepped inside quietly, expecting it to be empty.
It was not.
A woman stood at the stove, stirring something in a large pot with slow, practiced movements. She was older — maybe fifty or sixty, with grey hair pulled back in a loose bun and hands that moved like they had been doing this exact thing for decades. She did not hear me come in. Or maybe she did and simply did not care. She just kept stirring, humming something low and tuneless under her breath.
"Good morning," I said softly.
She turned around. Her eyes were brown and sharp — not unkind, but not soft either. The eyes of someone who had seen a lot and learned to keep most of it to herself. She looked at me for a long moment, up and down, the way you might look at a stray cat that wandered into your house.
"You must be the new one," she said. Not a question.
"Sable."
"Mrs. Holt." She turned back to her pot. "You are up early."
"I could not sleep." That was true. I had not slept properly since I arrived. "I thought — is there anything I can help with?"
Mrs. Holt stopped stirring. She turned around again, and this time she looked at me differently. Not measuring me. Studying me. Like she was trying to figure out why I was really here, in her kitchen, at this hour, asking to help.
"No one in this house has ever asked me that," she said quietly.
I did not know what to say to that. So I just stood there, hands clasped in front of me, waiting.
Mrs. Holt watched me for another few seconds. Then she reached behind her, grabbed an apron from a hook on the wall, and held it out to me.
"Can you chop?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Then chop."
She handed me a knife and a pile of vegetables — carrots, onions, celery — and pointed me toward a cutting board at the end of the counter. I got to work immediately, grateful to have something to do with my hands. Something normal. Something that did not involve sitting in silence or pretending I was not falling apart.
We worked side by side for a while without talking. The kitchen filled with the sound of the knife hitting the board, the bubbling of the pot, the quiet crackle of the stove. It was the most peaceful I had felt since arriving at Ironpaw. There was something about working — really working, with my hands, doing something useful — that made the noise in my head quiet down. Even the second heartbeat inside me seemed to calm, settling into a steady rhythm that almost felt comfortable.
Mrs. Holt broke the silence first.
"How are you settling in?" she asked. Her voice was casual. Careful. Like she already knew the answer but wanted to give me the chance to say it myself.
"Fine," I said. The word tasted like ash.
Mrs. Holt nodded slowly. She did not push. She just kept stirring her pot, and after a moment she said, very quietly, almost like she was talking to herself:
"The east hallway. Do not go there after dark. The third floor is locked — do not try the doors. And the guards change shifts at six in the morning and again at midnight. Those are the only times the back gate is unguarded for more than thirty seconds."
I stopped chopping. I turned my head slowly to look at her.
Mrs. Holt did not look back. She kept her eyes on the pot, kept stirring, kept her voice low and even.
"And one more thing," she said. "Be careful around Mr. Ravenclaw when he has been drinking. You can tell by the way he walks — slower than usual, heavier. When he walks like that, stay out of his path. Do not argue. Do not make eye contact. Just disappear."
I swallowed hard. "Has he—"
"Yes," Mrs. Holt said. Simply. Flatly. Like it was a fact about the weather. "Not just you. Others before you."
The knife in my hand suddenly felt very heavy. I set it down carefully and pressed my palms flat against the counter to steady myself.
"And Thalia," Mrs. Holt continued. "She is not your friend. She will smile at you. She will bring you things. She will act like she wants to help. She does not. Everything she does, she reports back to Mr. Ravenclaw. Everything."
I nodded. I already knew about Thalia. But hearing it confirmed — hearing it spoken out loud by someone who had clearly been watching this household for years — made it feel more real. More dangerous.
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked quietly.
Mrs. Holt finally looked at me. Her brown eyes were steady and sad and ancient in a way that had nothing to do with her age.
"Because someone should have told me," she said. "When I first came here. A long time ago. No one did."
We looked at each other for a long moment. Then Mrs. Holt turned back to her pot and handed me another pile of vegetables to chop. We worked in silence after that, but it was a different kind of silence. Not empty. Full. The kind that comes between two people who understand each other without needing to say much.
I spent the rest of the morning in that kitchen, chopping and stirring and listening to Mrs. Holt hum her quiet, tuneless songs. And for the first time since I arrived at Ironpaw, I did not feel completely alone.
But when I finally left the kitchen, just before noon, I stopped in the hallway and pressed my back against the wall.
My hands were tingling again. The same way they had this morning when I found the claw marks. I looked down at them — turned them over slowly, fingers spread wide.
And there, at the very tips of my fingers, just barely visible, just barely there — my nails were darker than they had been an hour ago.
Thicker.
Sharper.
I curled my fingers into fists and pressed them against my sides.
It was getting faster now. Whatever was waking up inside me — it was not taking its time anymore.
It was in a hurry.
And somewhere in the back of my mind, in the place where the second heartbeat lived, I heard something I had never heard before.
Not a feeling. Not a pull. A voice.
Faint. Ancient. Barely a whisper.
But it said my name.