Chapter Four: Into The Dark

Annabel's POV

Four days.

Four days of carrying what I'd heard like a stone lodged behind my sternum, heavy and sharp every time I breathed. Vampires. Omegas. Sacrifice. The words cycled on a loop underneath everything — underneath the scrubbing, the carrying, the keeping my face neutral while people laughed at me in hallways.

I hadn't told anyone.

Who would I tell?

"Faster, Annabel." Lucy didn't look up from her station. "Alpha and Luna want breakfast now, not tomorrow."

I scrubbed faster.

Behind me the kitchen hummed with the usual morning noise — pots, voices, the clatter of plates being stacked. Underneath it, quieter, the whispers. They never fully stopped. I'd learned to hear them the way you learn to hear rain — constant enough that you stop registering it as an event.

—still can't believe she's actually here—

—rejected mate scrubbing pots, honestly—

I kept my eyes on the sink. Made myself breathe. Made my hands move.

Lucy appeared at my elbow and held out the breakfast tray. "Alpha's quarters. Move."

I knocked once and entered.

Aldric was already dressed, already at the table, already somewhere else entirely — eyes on his phone, jaw set, the particular stillness of a man who had never once considered that the person setting food in front of him might have a pulse.

He didn't look up.

I set the tray down quietly and turned to leave.

"Annabel."

Lennon's voice stopped me at the door.

She was on the bed, silk sheets pooled around her, one hand resting on the small curve of her stomach. Her eyes were sharp and bright, the way they always were first thing in the morning — like cruelty was her coffee.

"The nursery needs to be cleaned before the furniture arrives." She said it the way you'd dictate a grocery list. "Every surface. Walls, floors, windowsills, corners." A brief pause. "My baby has a delicate immune system. The last thing I need is your incompetence making him sick before he's even born."

I said nothing.

"Did you hear me?"

"Yes, Luna."

Aldric turned a page. "Go," he said, without looking up.

I went.

I cleaned the nursery for four hours.

Soft yellow walls. Big windows. Tiny painted wolves along the baseboard that someone had done carefully, lovingly, by hand.

I scrubbed every inch of it.

***

That night, sleep wouldn't come again.

My body ached from the collar bones down — the specific exhaustion of physical work that never fully lets you rest, that follows you into the mattress and sits on your chest while you stare at the ceiling. I lay still for an hour before I gave up, pulled on my shoes, and walked.

Just walked. The hallways at this hour were dark and empty and quiet in a way that felt almost like privacy, which was the closest I got to it anymore.

I was passing the east corridor when I heard it again.

Voices. Low. Urgent.

I stopped.

Lennon's study. The door was cracked — just slightly, just enough for sound to leak through. I should have kept walking. Four days ago I'd told myself that. Keep walking. Don't listen. What you don't know can't destroy you.

I pressed myself against the wall and listened anyway.

"Is everything moving as planned?" Lennon's voice. Public warmth completely absent — what was left was something flat and cold and purposeful.

"Smoothly." A male voice, one I didn't recognize. "I'm sending word to the rogues at the border tonight. They'll handle everything. Clean, fast, no trail back to you."

"And the omegas?"

"Suitable ones. Exactly what was asked for."

My hand found the wall.

Rogues at the border.

Then the male voice said something that made my blood stop entirely.

"What about the one in the servants' wing? The rejected one. She's been—"

"Handle it." Lennon's voice didn't change pitch, didn't shift with emotion. She said it the way you'd say pass the salt. "She's seen too much. I want it done before the new moon."

The world tilted.

She was going to have me killed.

I backed away from the door. One step, then another, slow and careful, eyes fixed on the strip of light coming through the crack — and my elbow caught the vase on the hallway table.

It hit the floor like a gunshot.

Amelia's voice came sharp from inside. "Who's there?"

I ran.

No thought. No plan. Just legs moving, the hallway blurring, the entrance door slamming open as I hit it with both palms and burst out into the cold night air. The grounds were dark, the forest ahead a black wall, and I ran straight toward it because it was the only direction that wasn't back.

Behind me — howls.

Not pack wolves. The sound was wrong, rougher, wilder. Rogues. Already at the border, already close, already moving.

They'd been waiting.

I pushed into the trees, branches tearing at my face and arms, the ground uneven and dark beneath my feet. I tried to shift — reached for my wolf the way I always did, that deep internal call — and felt her stir weakly and fall back. Too exhausted. Too broken from months of deprivation and grief and a severed mate bond that had never fully stopped hurting.

She had nothing left to give.

Something slammed into me from the right.

I hit the ground so hard the impact whitened everything out for a full second — rolled, tasted dirt, scrambled upright. A rogue stood where I'd been, massive and low to the ground, lips pulled back. Then another stepped from between the trees. Then a third.

They circled me slowly.

"Nothing personal," the closest one said, voice rough, half-shifted jaw making the words thick. "Luna wants you dead. We don't make the rules."

"Then who do you make?" I said. My voice shook. I let it. Fear is honest.

He lunged.

I dropped and kicked out hard — caught him under the jaw with everything I had, felt the impact shudder up my leg. He staggered. I was already moving, already running again, deeper into the trees, the other two snarling behind me.

The ground disappeared.

One step it was there, solid and sure. The next it simply wasn't.

I fell.

The embankment was steep and brutal — rock, root, earth spinning past in the dark, each impact a new explosion of pain, the world tumbling over itself until I hit the bottom with a crash that drove every particle of air clean out of my lungs.

I lay still.

Breathing was a project. I worked on it carefully, one shallow pull at a time, staring up through the canopy at a sky full of cold stars.

Above me, at the top of the drop, I heard them skid to a stop.

Silence.

Then — "That's Lycan territory."

A long pause.

"We go in after her?"

"Are you out of your mind?" The voice went low and fast. "That's Kyrian Ashford's land. You set one foot past that line and you won't have feet anymore." A beat. "We tell Lennon she's dead. The fall, the dark — she won't last the night in there anyway. The Lycan King will finish what we started."

Footsteps. Retreating.

Gone.

I lay in the dirt and the dark and the cold, pain arriving in slow, enormous waves from places I couldn't count. Something warm was running down my temple. My left side had opinions about the landing that I didn't have the energy to address.

Lycan territory.

Kyrian Ashford.

Even in the servants' wing, even stripped of everything, I knew that name. Everyone knew that name — the way you know the name of something vast and dangerous and completely indifferent to your survival.

If he found me here, I was dead.

The thought arrived without the fear it should have carried. Maybe because the list of people who wanted me dead had just gotten longer and I was running out of room to be afraid of additions.

Footsteps.

Not retreating. Approaching.

Heavy. Deliberate. Something large moving through the dark toward me with the unhurried confidence of a creature that had never once in its life needed to announce itself.

I tried to move.

My body refused.

The footsteps stopped.

I looked up.

Everything went black.