Chapter 95 — You Can Leave

Chapter 95: Chapter 95 — You Can Leave

~ Raven ~

Raven wasn’t in the clearing anymore.

She was standing in a forest she had never seen before.

The trees were larger and spaced farther apart, and the light filtering through their branches had a strange colour to it that Raven couldn’t place.

A girl stood in the middle of the clearing with her back to something.

Black hair fell loose halfway down her back. She was small. Eight, perhaps nine.

Four masked figures stood in front of her, with another moving around from the side, and every time one of them changed position, the girl shifted with them, keeping herself between the figures and whatever lay behind her.

Raven looked past the girl.

There was something behind her, partly hidden by the trunk of a broad tree. Raven could make out just enough to know the girl was protecting something, but the tree blocked most of it from view.

She shifted her attention, trying to see around the trunk, but from where she was, all she caught was the edge of a shape before it disappeared again.

The girl didn’t know how to fight.

That was immediately obvious.

She fought like a child who had never been taught where to put her feet or what to do with her hands. She grabbed at clothes, hung onto arms, sank her teeth into one man’s wrist and threw her entire body into another man’s knees when he tried to get around her.

One of them shoved her aside.

She hit the ground, rolled once, then scrambled back to her feet and planted herself in exactly the same place.

Raven couldn’t hear her thoughts, but she understood anyway.

It wasn’t courage.

There was no thought of bravery in the girl’s face.

There was only one simple certainty filling every part of her.

Nobody was getting past her.

Run, Raven thought at her. You’re nine. Run.

The girl planted her feet harder.

One of the masked men seized the front of her dress and threw her.

She flew several feet before hitting the ground and rolling through the leaves. As the man’s arm came down, his sleeve slipped back from his wrist.

Raven saw the mark.

A small skull split down the middle by a broken crescent.

Cold went through her.

Raven tried to go to her and discovered she couldn’t. She had no body here, no feet to carry her or hands to reach with. She was inside whatever this was, but not part of it.

She could only watch.

The girl got up again.

There was blood on her mouth now. She wiped none of it away. She simply walked back across the clearing, returned to the same patch of ground and spread her arms in front of the nothing.

"Move."

The leader sounded amused.

Not cruel or angry.

If anything, he sounded as though he were enjoying a pleasant afternoon.

The girl shook her head.

"Move, child."

"No."

The masked figures moved toward her.

Before they reached the girl, the scene ripped away.

The forest vanished, and Raven found herself inside a warm room flooded with sunlight. The same black-haired girl was in the air, shrieking with laughter while a man swung her around by the waist.

He was beautiful.

The thought arrived before Raven could stop it.

Not handsome in the ordinary way. There was something almost unfair about his face, as though every feature had been placed with too much care and nobody looking at him had been considered in the process.

He lowered the girl to the floor and crouched in front of her, resting his hands lightly on her arms while he said something Raven couldn’t hear.

Whatever it was made the girl grin.

She reached forward, pressed both palms against his cheeks and squashed his face between them.

He let her.

A door opened behind them.

The girl’s entire expression changed.

She tore across the room before the woman entering had even finished stepping through the doorway.

Raven tried to look at her.

Hands.

A dark sleeve.

The curve of one shoulder.

That was all.

Every time Raven tried to follow the woman’s body upward, her attention slipped away and came back empty, exactly as it had in the forest.

And somehow Raven knew this mattered.

Please.

She pulled against whatever was stopping her with everything she had.

Let me see her face.

The room began to bleach.

The white didn’t come from the girl, the man or the woman. It spread across the memory itself, slow and relentless, the way damp creeps through plaster.

It reached the man first.

One moment he was crouched in the middle of the sunlit room.

The next, he was gone.

Then it reached the woman while she was still walking toward the girl, her arms already lifting to catch her.

Raven tried to hold the scene together.

There was nothing to hold it with.

The white became unbearable.

Then the screaming started.

Raven couldn’t tell who it belonged to.

A child, perhaps?

There was a woman’s scream beneath it too, or maybe that was something else entirely. The sound came from every direction at once, rising and falling without ever stopping, until the white fractured around her and every broken piece carried another image.

A hand reaching for someone.

Blood spreading slowly across pale stone.

The skull and broken crescent so close that it filled everything.

The black-haired girl with her mouth wide open and no sound coming from it at all.

"RAVEN!"

The voice came from impossibly far away.

It sounded angry and desperate.

Trying to drag her somewhere.

Raven knew that voice.

She almost had the name—

The white closed over it.

Then there was nothing except white.

No forest.

No room.

No floor beneath her, no sky above, no direction that felt different from another.

Raven tried to remember which way she’d come from and discovered there was no way to remember something that had never existed.

The screaming continued.

Oh, Raven thought with strange calm. I’m not getting out of this one.

"Raven."

A different voice.

Quieter than the first and closer.

She didn’t know whose it was, but she knew she had heard it before, and more importantly, it was the only thing in this place that wasn’t screaming.

So she reached for it the way a drowning person reached for anything that might float.

"Listen to me."

Raven listened.

"You’re not there."

The screams surged around her, but the voice came through them.

"Whatever you’re seeing, it can’t keep you."

Something far beyond the white began to register.

Hands.

Someone was holding her arms.

Not hurting her.

The grip was firm enough to stop her from moving, but careful at the same time, as though whoever held her was forcing themselves to remember how easily she might break.

"You’re not trapped."

The voice changed.

Until then it had been level and controlled.

Now something slipped through.

"You can leave."

The white pulled harder.

The wrong forest rushed back around her.

The enormous trees.

That impossible light.

The black-haired girl was standing in front of the broad tree again, arms spread while the masked figures closed in, still guarding whatever Raven couldn’t see behind the trunk.

The whole vision seemed to fold around Raven, trying to drag her deeper into it.

"Follow my voice."

The girl turned her head.

Raven saw it clearly.

The child looked away from the men for one impossible second, as though she had heard him too.

"Come back."

Then, so quietly Raven almost lost it beneath the screaming—

"Please, Raven."

It wasn’t the command that did it.

Raven had been given commands her entire life. She had been ordered to kneel, bow, serve, apologise, stay quiet, stay in her place.

Commands had never been particularly effective on her.

It was the please.

Raven turned away from the black-haired girl.

Then she went toward the voice.

The vision came apart like wet paper.

Sound returned first, but only in pieces.

Someone breathing too quickly nearby.

Boots moving through leaves.

A woman giving instructions in short, clipped sentences.

Then came the smell.

Blood.

Crushed leaves.

The lingering sweetness of rot.

And finally, Raven became aware of the hands holding her.

She opened her eyes.

Cassian Blade was directly above her.

For several seconds, Raven only stared.

His white hair had fallen messily across his forehead, soft strands catching against his lashes, and black blood had dried in a dark streak along the sharp line of his jaw.

Up close, there was no missing how beautiful he was. Cassian’s face was usually too still to invite the thought, all clean lines and quiet control, but now that control was gone.

His eyes caught her first.

Pale silver-blue, bright with his wolf so close to the surface, and completely unguarded.

There was worry in them.

Not the distant concern of someone checking whether an injured student was conscious. Not curiosity. Not even the careful attention he gave everything he was trying to understand.

This was raw.

Fear, relief, something almost desperate, all of it sitting openly on his face before he could hide any of it.

Raven stared at him, startled enough that for a second she forgot everything else.

Why did he look like that?

Why did Cassian Blade, who had walked toward ten corrupted wolves without so much as raising his voice, look as though she had been the thing that frightened him?

His wolf stared down at her through those pale eyes.

Whatever was still pouring out of Raven reached it.

Cassian flinched.

She felt the shudder run through his arms where he held her, felt his wolf recoil from something inside her—

and still he didn’t let go.

His eyes widened when he noticed she was awake.

"Raven?"

She tried to answer, but her wolf got there first.

It surged through her so suddenly that Raven’s breath caught. There was no hesitation in it, no uncertainty, only a recognition so complete that it startled her.

Her wolf knew him.

Not in the distant way Raven recognised a face or remembered a name. It knew Cassian instinctively, with the same unquestioned certainty that told Raven how to move her own hand or draw her next breath.

Her eyes burned suddenly, and before she understood why, tears spilled over and slid into her hair.

She stared up at him.

A boy she barely knew, while something inside her recognized him with a certainty that made no sense at all.

She didn’t understand it. Nothing in her could explain what she was feeling, but the word was already rising...

"Mate."

The entire clearing went silent.

Raven saw the exact moment Cassian’s control broke. It lasted no more than a heartbeat, but in that heartbeat everything opened across his face at once: shock, recognition, and something deeper she wasn’t conscious enough to name.

Then the last of her strength disappeared.

Cassian’s face blurred above her.

And this time, when the darkness came, Raven let it take her.