Sable doesn’t say she’s sorry again. She said it in the cabin, and it was enough. Instead, she asks, “How long ago?”
“I don’t know. Years.” I look at my hands. The firelight makes the scars glow. “It could be…three years. Five. I lost count. They don’t keep calendars where I was.”
“We’ll find out,” she says. “When this is over. We’ll find your family.”
The certainty in her voice makes my chest tight. Notif.When.
“Is there anyone else who’d be looking for you?” she asks. The question is careful. Practical. She’s thinking like a healer planning a patient’s discharge: resources, contacts, a network of people who care. “Friends? A community? Someone who noticed you were missing?”
“Maybe. The music program…there were people. Students. Colleagues.” I reach for faces and find blurred images. “I don’t remember clearly enough.”
She nods. Then, quieter: “A mate?”
I go still.
Mate.
It means something specific among wolves. Something permanent, something the body knows before the mind admits. The bond that’s carved into the marrow.
I know all of that. And I’m certain that I never experienced. Not then.
“No,” I say. “I never had a mate.”
“You’re sure?”
“There was never anyone like that. But…” I hesitate. “I’m not sure I’d have known what to look for.”
She tilts her head. “What do you mean?”
“My family lived as human. We weren’t around other wolves. I didn’t grow up in a pack where people talked about mates or bonds or any of that. I’d met maybe…a handful of wolves my whole life, outside my parents.” I look at the fire. “When I was taken, I was living alone. Working. Human world. The wolf was something I kept to the trails and the mountains. I didn’t even know there were others like me nearby.”
“So you never experienced the pull?” she says.
“I don’t know what the pull feels like. Not in a way I could name.”
She’s quiet. Something in her face has shifted. “For pack wolves, it’s unmistakable. When you meet the right one, your wolf knows. Before your mind catches up, before you’ve decided anything, the wolf has already chosen. And once that happens, you can’t fight it. The wolf doesn’t ask what your plans were.”
I look up at her. “No. It doesn’t.” I pause. “So you know what it is. You’ve felt it.”
“I had one,” she says. The words are careful.
“A mate?” I ask.
“Almost. He would’ve been. The bond was forming. I could feel it, and he could feel it, and our wolves were…” She stops.Swallows. “His name was Jason. He was injured. Badly. He went into a coma, and he didn’t wake up.”
The cave is very quiet.
“I sat beside him for eleven days,” she says. Her voice is steady, but the steadiness costs her. I can see it in the tension along her jaw, the way her hands press flat against her knees. “Talking to him. Waiting. And then he was gone, and the bond that was forming just…stopped. Like a sound cut off.”
The image hits me. A sound cut off. I know what that feels like. The silence after is worse than anything.
“I thought that was it for me,” she says. “My chance. True mates don’t come along often, and some wolves never find one at all. I figured I was done with that part of life. So I focused on healing. On other people’s bodies, other people’s pain. It was enough.” She looks at the fire. “It had to be enough.”
I don’t speak. What she’s told me feels like it needs space to breathe for a moment.
The fire crackles. I add another piece of wood. My hand is steady. But inside, something is rearranging itself. The things she described: the wolf knowing, the pull you can’t fight. I think about the locked room. The drugs pressing everything down. And through all of it, my wolf turning toward one scent. One voice. One set of hands. Before I knew my own name, before I could open my eyes, the wolf had already decided something. He was reaching for her through the dark. Not choosing, not thinking. Just knowing.
I didn’t have a word for it then. I’m not sure I have it now.
