They brought him to Timothy's cabin.
It wasn't the main hall, too formal for a late-night emergency and too full of ghosts and expectations.
Timothy preferred the quiet of his own home, a sturdy log building at the edge of the training grounds, where the only sound was the wind through the pines and the occasional distant howl.
The fire inside was already roaring when Sebastian stepped through the door, as if someone had known he was coming.
As if the house itself had been holding its breath.
Timothy stood by the hearth.
He was not an alpha in the traditional sense, with no booming voice, no posturing, and no threats carved into his posture like warnings on a blade.
He was calm. Collected.
His dark eyes held the kind of patience that came from years of watching and waiting, like a river that had seen too many floods to be surprised by rain.
He rarely raised his temper. Sebastian had never even heard him yell.
But tonight, something in Timothy's expression shifted when he saw Sebastian's face. Something that looked like the first crack in a dam.
"Sit down," Timothy said quietly.
"You look like you're about to fall apart."
Sebastian didn't sit. He couldn't.
His body was still humming with the need to move, to run, to find, like a tuning fork struck against the anvil of panic.
His legs wanted to carry him through the walls and into the dark. His heart wanted to tear itself out and go looking on its own.
Others were already gathering.
Shane leaned against the far wall, his arms crossed, his jaw tight as a clenched fist.
Lyla sat on the arm of the couch, her fingers drumming nervously against her knee—a nervous rhythm, a heartbeat made visible.
They were Lucas's closest friends.
The ones who had held him together after every motel room, after every silent breakfast, after every time Sebastian had walked out the door without looking back.
They knew something.
Sebastian could see it in the way they avoided each other's eyes. In this way, guilt sat on their shoulders like a second skin.
But no one spoke.
"Tell us," Timothy said. "What happened to Lucas?"
Sebastian closed his eyes.
The vision rose behind his lids like bile, like floodwater, like something that had been drowning him from the inside.
"There's a stone table," he began, his voice barely above a whisper. The kind of voice you use in cathedrals and graveyards.
The kind of voice that knows something sacred and terrible is watching.
The effect was immediate.
Shane went rigid, his spine snapping straight like a bow drawn too tight.
Lyla's drumming fingers stopped mid-tap, frozen in midair like birds that had forgotten how to fly.
Even Max, who had been leaning by the door, straightened like someone had poured ice water down the back of his shirt.
Timothy's calm expression didn't crack, but his eyes did. Just a flicker. Just enough for Sebastian to see that he knew.
They all knew.
Every wolf in the room had grown up with the stories. The Hollow Table wasn't just a place. It was a warning.
A lullaby parents sang to misbehaving pups.
Be good, or the Hollow Table will call your name. A nightmare dressed in stone and an old, old story.
"The table is old," Sebastian continued.
"Dark. Carved with symbols I couldn't read. The kind of writing that looks like it was made by hands that had forgotten how to be gentle. Lucas was stretched across it like an offering. Like a lamb on an altar."
Lyla pressed a hand to her mouth.
Shane turned away, his fists clenching at his sides, knuckles white as bone.
"His wrists were bound in silver-chained knots. The silver had already burned through his skin. I could see the blisters. The blood was black in the dim light, like oil. Like something that used to be alive."
Sebastian swallowed hard. The memory tasted like copper.
"His chest was bare. And there were people circling him. I couldn't see their faces. They were blurry. Like they didn't want to be remembered. Like they were wearing masks made of fog."
Timothy's voice, when he spoke, was barely audible. A man walking through a dream he couldn't wake from.
"The Hollow Table."
A shiver went through the room.
Not the kind of shiver that comes from cold. The kind that comes from hearing a ghost speak your name.
The kind that crawls up your spine on little spider feet and settles somewhere behind your heart, whispering, "You knew; you always knew this was always how it would end."
Every wolf knew the stories.
The Hollow Table was older than any living pack member. Older than the territory itself.
Older, some whispered, than the moon itself. It was a place of sacrifice used by rogue witches and fallen wolves who had abandoned the Moon's grace, who had traded their souls for something sharper and hungrier.
Rituals performed there didn't heal. They were unmade.
They peeled away everything that made a wolf what it was—layer by layer, memory by memory, scream by scream—until nothing remained but raw, bleeding power.
A hollow thing wearing a wolf's skin.
"There was an old woman," Sebastian said, his voice cracking like thin ice.
"She had her hands over Lucas's head. Her lips were moving, some kind of chant, I think. I couldn't hear the words. But I heard him."
He looked at Timothy.
At Shane and Lyla. At Max and Lucian, who had gone pale as moonlight.
"I heard Lucas scream."
The fire crackled. No one else moved.
Even the flames seemed to lean away, as if the sound of that scream had reached across whatever distance separated them and pressed a cold finger to the back of every neck in the room.
"They weren't healing him," Sebastian continued, his words tumbling out faster now, a dam breaking, a confession spilling.
"They were peeling him. Their hands pressed against his bare chest, and his skin split beneath their fingers like wet paper. Like something that had been waiting to tear. Blood welled up. Too much of it. It pooled in the grooves of the stone and dripped onto the earth below, and I could hear it. The dripping. Like a clock counting down."
Lyla made a small, wounded sound. The kind an animal makes when it's too tired to scream.
Shane pulled her close, his own face carved from stone, his own heart bleeding somewhere no one could see.
Sebastian pressed a hand to his own chest, right over where the bond had hooked him all those months ago.
Right over the place that had never stopped aching.
"I felt it. Every cut. Every scream. The bond pulled me under like a riptide, and I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I just had to watch as he—"
He stopped.
His jaw clenched so tight he thought his teeth might shatter.
"He arched off the table. His back bowed so far I thought he would break in half. Like a bow strung too tight. Like something that had forgotten how to be straight. And then I heard him whisper something. His last breath, I think. The kind of breath you don't expect to follow with another."
Sebastian looked up at Timothy.
"He said my name, Sebastian."
Silence.