Page 38 of The Fated Hunter Wolf

Everything went still.

Sable was on her knees, not moving. Her hair splayed across her face.

Throughout the pack, wolves gasped like they’d been drowning. Some were puking. Others just cried.

I felt nothing. No pain. No anger. Just emptiness. Hollow as a cave.

I'd done it. Severed the bond.

The emptiness came first—a howling void where Sable had been. Then my wolf erupted from that void, a creature of pure instinct and rage, seizing control before I could stop it. The shift tore through me with vicious speed, bones cracking and reforming, but I barely felt the pain through the wolf's fury.

No, not like this?—

My human consciousness flickered, drowning beneath the wolf's feral hunger. I tried to hold on, to stay present behind its eyes, but the bond's absence had unmoored me. Without Sable to anchor my humanity, there was nothing to tether me to rational thought. The wolf shoved deeper, forcing me down into the dark recesses of our shared mind where I couldn't reach the surface, couldn't control our body, couldn't even see what we were doing.

The last thing I felt before the darkness swallowed me completely was four paws hitting earth—and my wolf running wild with no one left inside to stop it.

16

SABLE

Ireject you.

I couldn’t breathe or move. My ears filled with pressure, like I’d been dragged beneath black water. I surged forward, hands and knees hitting the earth without permission. My spine arched instinctively as if I could dodge the echo still reverberating through my chest.

I was being disassembled.

A part of me was being torn from its roots. And I knew he felt it too.

The bond snapped inside me like a rope fraying one thread at a time, unraveling through the marrow of my bones. My vision blurred. My tears had turned to ash long ago, but this was an internal quake. My wolf let out a noise—part sob, part howl, part static silence. She was hollow.

And Goddess, the silence after. No more hum. No pulse. The quiet replaced them.

I tasted copper on my tongue, and it turned out I’d bitten my lip, hard. My magic recoiled into itself.

He’d done it. He’d severed the bond.

And in that moment, kneeling in a crater of magic and grief, all I wanted was to feel nothing at all. Instead, a wave crashed over me. It burned, turning my core into molten lava.

I fell to my knees as the surroundings faded into nothing. I was aware of movement, of feet running in my direction, while everything else was dulled. Cotton wool over my ears. A hand came to rest in the space between my shoulder blades.

“I’m here, Mama Sabe. It’s okay.”

Astrid’s presence soothed a small part of my being while the rest of me was on fire. I wanted to give in to it, to become one with the earth below me. To let everything drift away and be nothing.

Nothing.

Never before had a sensation so visceral called to me from within—I wanted to die.

My head hit the ground before I knew I was falling.

“Sable!” Astrid screamed and placed her hand behind my head, cradling me like a child, the way I had done with her when I’d first rescued her from the grips of those sick bastards. “Don’t you give up on me, Sable,” she whispered into my ear, and a melody filled the air. A gentle tune I knew from my deepest, oldest memories.

My mother.

The melody brought me back from the edge of nothing, anchoring me to memories I’d buried deep. For a moment, I wasn’t lying broken on Orion territory with my soul torn in half. I was small again, safe again, before I understood what it meant to be hunted for what I was.

Before I learned that wanting something could destroy you.