Chapter 12

Sable's POV

Yarrow sent me back to camp with more questions than I walked in with, and no real answers to go along with them. I spent the walk back turning her words over ‘he stopped halfway through’ trying to figure out what that even meant for someone like me.

By the time I reached the fire pit, the sun had started dipping low, and the camp had shifted into its evening rhythm. Someone was cooking something over the flames that smelled better than anything Reva ever let me eat. A few wolves sat scattered around, talking low, glancing my way and then quickly not glancing my way, the same dance I'd gotten used to over the past few days.

I found a spot near the edge of the fire, far enough from the crowd to not feel like I was intruding, close enough to actually feel warm.

"You're the one Rook picked up."

The voice came from behind me, flat, not really a question. I turned and found the woman from earlier, the one Ivy had pointed out on our walk,Sela, the one who said no to an arranged mating with a knife instead of words.

"That's me," I said.

She sat down across from me without being invited, close enough that the firelight caught every sharp angle of her face. She looked older than I guessed from a distance, hard years written into the lines around her eyes.

"Heard you healed Bram with your bare hands," she said.

"I don't really know what I did. It just happened."

"That's what everybody keeps saying about you." She picked at a thread on her sleeve, not quite looking at me. "Convenient, not knowing anything about yourself."

"I'm not lying."

"Didn't say you were." She finally looked up, and whatever calm had been in her voice a second ago sharpened into something else. "I'm saying it's convenient. You show up bleeding, nobody knows a thing about you, and somehow you've already got Rook wrapped around your problems."

"He's not wrapped around anything. He pulled me out of a bad situation. That's it."

"Is it?" She said it like she didn't believe a word of it. "You know how many people I've watched him do that for? Pull out of the woods, half-dead, promise them a place here, defend them at the fire when the rest of us have concerns?"

I didn't answer, mostly because I didn't have a good answer.

"A lot," Sela continued, not waiting for me anyway. "More than I can count on both hands. And you know how many of them are still here?"

"I don't."

"Not many." She let that sit for a second, the fire crackling between us, before she went on. "Some ran off the second things got hard. Some got themselves killed doing something reckless because they thought this place owed them safety just for showing up. A couple turned out to be exactly the kind of trouble that follows people like you."

"I'm not trouble"

"You've got a brand on your chest that's still active weeks after it should've gone dead, and rogues wearing somebody's private mark have already come hunting for you once. That's not trouble?" She raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. "That's the definition of trouble, sweetheart."

Heat crawled up my neck, half embarrassment, half something closer to anger. "I didn't ask for any of this."

"Neither did the last three people Rook took in who ended up getting good people hurt trying to protect them." Her voice stayed even, but there was an edge underneath it now, something personal. "One of them got a scout killed. Another one brought a whole hunting party down on us before we even knew what we'd taken in."

"That's not fair. You're comparing me to people I don't even know."

"I'm telling you what I've seen." She leaned forward slightly, and I caught the sharp smell of knife oil on her hands, something she must have been working with earlier, metal and something faintly bitter underneath it. "Rook's got a good heart. Good enough that it makes him blind sometimes. He sees somebody hurting, and he doesn't stop to ask what that hurt might bring down on the rest of us."

"So what do you want from me? An apology for existing?"

"I want you to understand something before you get too comfortable around this fire." She held my gaze steady, unblinking, close enough now that I could see every hard line of her expression clearly in the firelight. "This isn't your home yet. It's a roof nobody here agreed to give you. Rook offered it on his own, and the rest of us are just living with that choice whether we like it or not."

"That's his call to make, isn't it? You said yourself, no ranks, no Alpha telling anyone what to do."

"Doesn't mean the rest of us don't have to worry about what his choices cost us." Something flickered behind her eyes then, something that looked almost like old grief instead of pure suspicion. "I've buried people because of choices like this one. Good people. So forgive me if I don't throw you a welcome feast just because you healed one boy's ribs and Rook's decided you're worth the risk."

I sat with that for a moment, the fire popping loud in the silence between us, unsure what she wanted me to say, unsure if there was anything I could say that would actually change her mind.

"I'm not planning on getting anyone killed," I said finally. "That's the best I can offer you."

"Everybody says that." Sela leaned back, some of the tension easing out of her shoulders, though her eyes never fully softened. "Doesn't mean it turns out true."

She stood, brushing dirt off her knees, and looked down at me one last time before walking off toward her own tent.

"He's done this before," she said. "Taken in strays. They don't usually last.”