He doesn’t know what came before. Nobody does. Not Kaylin. Not the Aurora intake. I gave them clean facts and kept the rest to myself.
“My mother’s name was Mirielle,” I say. “Sangrey was hers. The name runs through the women…her mother carried it, and hers before that, all the way back. The men marry in.”
He goes quiet in the way that means he’s listening with everything.
“She was a witch. My father was a wolf, but not just any wolf. His people carried witch-blood of their own—generations back, thinned out, never gone. That’s the only match the line takes. Mother used to say the line knows its own.” I smooth a thread on the canvas. “It’s how Serenity and I came out carrying both.”
“The glamour.”
“She trained us in it from the time we could walk. Don’t be seen. Don’t be remembered. It was the only protection she had to give. There aren’t enough of us to form packs. We wereisolated. Living on the outskirts of a human town, trying not to stand out.” My thumb stops on the thread. “Then she got sick. Cancer. She fought it, and then she was gone, and everything she’d been holding steady in us started to slip. Serenity’s magic sits close to the surface. Our mother kept her level. Without her, it showed.” I breathe. “The Syndicate found us. It didn’t take them long.”
“The facility.”
“Both of us.” My arms have crossed without my telling them to. My fingers find the raised lines inside my elbows and press. “They knew what we were from the first blood draw.”
“What did they want?”
“Wolf-witch hybrid. Our magic. They wanted to know how it works. Whether they could pull it out of us and put it into someone else.” I keep my voice level. “They took a lot of blood.” I press down on another ridge in my elbow.
His jaw sets. Just for a second. I take it for anger. God knows there’s enough to be angry about, but somehow, I’ve never had it in me. Maybe it’s good that he’ll hold it for me.
“Serenity couldn’t hold her magic back. It was more visible under stress. So they went at her harder.” The lines under my fingers seem to warm. “She screamed the first time. After that she went quiet. I still don’t know which was worse.”
He doesn’t answer that. He’s right not to.
“I was building a way out. For both of us. I knew the guards, I knew which nights the team ran thin. Then one morning her cell was cleared, and nobody would say where she’d gone.” My throat wants to close. I push through it. “A few weeks later my window came. A short-staffed night. A door that should have locked and didn’t. I pulled the glamour so tight it hurt and walked down a corridor past three men, and not one of them turned around.”
“And then Aurora.”
“Two nights on farm roads first. An old wolf with a truck found me and didn’t ask a single question. He drove me to their gate.” I meet his eyes. “They weren’t raiding facilities back then. They knew something was happening to people like us—rumors, fragments—but the rescues came later. Viktor sat across a table from me and told me they’d look for my sister. I think he meant it. I’m sure he did.” My hands are starting to shake. “Nothing came.”
“And then you found the phone.”
I nod. “In my cubicle. Just lying there.” The shaking spreads up my arms. “I’ve spent months telling myself they moved her because she’s valuable. If they moved her, she’s somewhere. If she’s somewhere, there’s a way to find her.” My voice cracks on the next part. “Some nights I can’t hold it. Some nights I imagine what they’ve been doing to her since I walked down that corridor without her.”
My jaw locks. My eyes sting and spill anyway.
“She’s twenty-three. Sweet and bright. And I’m the protector. But I’m the one who got out, while she—” The words choke off.
He moves.
He’s beside me before I look up. One arm around my shoulders, then both, and I’m against his chest—warm, solid, asking nothing. He holds on. No words. No promises. The heat of him soaks through his shirt into the back of my neck, and the shaking runs itself out against him because for once I’m not the only thing holding me up.
His heartbeat stays slow under my ear. I hang on to the sound.
“I will not rest,” I say. “Not until I find her.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to get her out.”
“I know that too.”
The silence settles. The hard man with the empty wallet and no photographs turns out to be the softest place I’ve ever landed.
After a while, my breathing evens out. “Decker…”
“You don’t have to thank me for that,” he says, before I can.
