Chapter 109 The Cost of Love

Chapter 109 The Cost of Love
Sable's POV

The walk back to the cell felt longer than it had the first time.

Four warriors surrounded me again, their hands firm on the chains binding my wrists. The silver bit into my skin every time the metal shifted — a sharp reminder that I wasn’t just a prisoner. I was something dangerous that needed to be contained. Or at least that’s what they wanted everyone to believe.

The hallway was cold, the stone walls carrying the damp scent of underground chambers and old magic. Every step echoed like a drumbeat inside my skull. I kept my head down — not because I was ashamed, but because if I looked up, I might break.

The doors opened. The warriors pushed me forward. The cell was exactly how I left it, dark, quiet and unchanged.

One of the guards unlocked the gate with a loud click. “Inside.”

I didn’t argue. I stepped in, and the silver bars hummed faintly the moment I crossed the threshold, magic sliding over my skin like cold water, dulling the instincts that had always been part of me. My wolf recoiled — not in anger. In pain.

The door slammed shut behind me, the sound echoing through the chamber like a final verdict. The warriors left without another word.

And suddenly I was alone.

I stood there for a long moment staring at the floor before my knees gave out. I sank onto the narrow cot in the corner and folded forward, elbows braced on my thighs, palms pressed into my eyes.

“Goddess…”

The word slipped out before I could stop it. My chest hurt like someone had reached into my chest and torn something vital away. Because I had.

The rejection. I could still feel the echo of it ripping through the bond, the moment our connection snapped apart like a thread pulled too tight. My wolf whimpered somewhere deep inside me. I closed my eyes.

“I know,” I whispered.

She had retreated, curled into the farthest corner of my mind where the pain couldn’t reach her as easily. She was hurt, disappointed in me, maybe, in a way I didn’t have the strength yet to sit with.

My throat tightened. “I didn’t have a choice.”

But even as I said it, doubt curled through me. Had I? My mind replayed the moment again — standing in that chamber, the council watching, Kier looking at me like the ground had disappeared beneath his feet. And Liora’s voice, echoing: I’m carrying the heir to this pack.

My stomach twisted. The image of her standing there, calm and confident, resting her hand over the child growing inside her, had hit harder than any blow. Because I’d felt it through the bond that night — the moment Kier had been with her. The pain had burned through me like fire in my veins. My wolf had howled, and I had known. Something had changed between us.

I wrapped my arms around myself, staring at the cold stone floor. If Liora was telling the truth, then Kier was going to be a father. The future Alpha. And I would always be the woman who came between them.

“No.” I shook my head. I couldn’t be that person. I couldn’t be the Luna who destroyed another wolf’s family just because fate had tied my soul to Kier’s. The pack deserved better than that. He deserved better. Even if it broke me to give it to him.

Tears burned behind my eyes. I pressed my lips together and forced them back, because crying wouldn’t change anything. The rejection had been final. Irreversible.

My wolf stirred again — restless now, sharper than the whimper from before. Not angry at Kier. Angry at me. She had loved him too, maybe more fiercely than I’d ever let myself admit, and she wasn’t finished making me feel the cost of that.

“I did what I had to,” I whispered. She didn’t agree.

The silence in the cell pressed in around me, too quiet, too empty, and my thoughts drifted unwillingly back to him. Kier in the council chamber, his voice breaking when he shouted my name. I kept coming back to one morning instead, before any of this, when he’d burned his hand pulling a kettle off the fire too fast and sworn in three languages before catching me laughing at him, and instead of getting prideful about it, he’d just laughed too, pressed his cold water-soaked hand to my neck to make me shriek, and called it fair payment for witnessing his humiliation. That was the version of him no one in that council chamber would ever see. Alpha. Predator. Unshakeable. And underneath all of it, a man who could be undone by a kettle and let me see it.

All of it was gone now.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered into the empty room. Because I loved him. God, I loved him, and there was no amount of telling myself I’d done the right thing that made the loving stop.

I leaned back against the wall and stared up at the ceiling. What happens now?

The council had said sentencing would come in four nights. Four nights in this cell waiting for them to decide what my life was worth. Maybe exile. Maybe banishment from the pack entirely. The thought should have frightened me. Instead it just felt empty — because even if they released me, where would I go? I couldn’t return to the life I’d had before. Not after rejecting the Alpha of my own pack in front of the council. No pack would take me. No wolf would trust me. My entire future had been built on the bond with Kier, and I had been the one to take it apart.

For a moment, panic crept in. What if I can’t survive this? What if the pain never fades? My hand pressed over my chest, instinctively, to the place where the bond used to burn. Now it was just quiet. Too quiet.

My wolf shifted weakly, and some stubborn, wounded part of me wanted to take it all back — wanted to march back into that chamber and tell them I’d been wrong, that I’d take the bond and the title and Liora’s claims and fight for all of it rather than sit here in the dark having given it away on principle. The thought lasted only a moment before I let it go, because I knew, even now, that if I had the chance again, I’d still choose the same way. That didn’t make it hurt less. It just made it mine.

I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe slowly.

“You’ll survive,” I whispered. Even if it felt impossible. Even if it felt like I’d carved my own heart out with my own hands.

Because sometimes doing the right thing meant losing everything.

And loving Kier — really loving him — meant letting him go.