“She can’t undo this,” she says.
Her fingers press into the scar.
“She can name you. She can touch you. She can sit by your fire and tell you pretty things about bonds.” Her eyes hold mine across the dying light. “But she didn’t map you. She didn’t open you. She didn’t learn every threshold by listening to your body break.”
Her thumb moves along the line she carved.
“I did.”
The fire gutters.
“The girl gave you a word. I gave you what you are.”
The fire goes out.
The cave is dark. The pine scent is gone. The stream is silent. The floral chemical smell fills the space where the smokewas: sweet, antiseptic, the perfume that never covers what’s underneath.
Her hand is still on my ribs. In the dark. Her fingers pressing the scar.
“You’ll come back to me,” she says. Gentle. Certain. The voice of a woman who has never been wrong about the things she owns. “You’ll always come back.”
The dark thickens, and the cave folds in on itself. Stone flattens into white panels. The ceiling drops into a hard white square above me. The hand on my ribs becomes the strap across my chest, and the rock beneath my back becomes the cot.
The fire is gone.
Maybe it was never here.
Only a dream the gas gave me while I lay on my back in a room that doesn’t breathe.
I’m awake.
Restraints. Padded cuffs. Wrists, chest, ankles. My jaw is wrong, too heavy, the shift stalled halfway. My hands are clawed, the nails pressing into my own palms.
The cave is gone.
So is Sable.
The white room is all there is: ward cycles pulsing through the walls, cuffs biting my wrists, my wolf pressed low and flat because the dream took the one place that was ours and put her in it.
I pull against the restraints. Not to escape. My body needs movement, resistance, anything except lying still with the ghost of her fingers on my ribs.
Through the cracked observation glass, air leaks in.
A thread.
And on that thread, a scent.
Cold. Clinical. Floral over chemical, expensive over empty. The perfume from the dream, except my eyes are open now, and the gas has burned off, and the scent is still here.
My hands stop pulling.
My breathing stops.
The wolf doesn’t snarl. He goes still in the old way, the way he learned when footsteps stopped outside the door, and the wrong hand reached for the lock.
She’s in the building.
The dream didn’t invent her. It found her.
