Page 22 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
When I return to my quarters, the door is unlocked. The room is the same box it has been since the escape failed, but the soot on my fingers smells like coal and iron and heated stone, and the smell belongs to me rather than to the captivity.
I sit against the wall and press my palm to the stone. The chimney draws his fire into the channels between our rooms, and his scent reaches me through the rock with a sharpness the clean forge air makes painfully clear. After hours without him in my lungs, the return is a blow.
My wolf stirs again, pressing toward the heat in the stone, toward him. The same hunger she aimed at the forge fire, but sharper now, more specific. My biology knows what it wants on the other side of that wall. My mind knows what it would cost.
On the other side, the sounds of his evening settle into their familiar pattern: boots on stone, the weight of a body lowering into a chair, the pause that precedes the whetstone. Tonight the whetstone does not start. The silence on his side has the quality of a wolf who is waiting rather than occupying his routine.
He’s listening for me.
I press my palm flat against the stone and open my mouth.
"My mother's forge was half the size of Dag's." The words come out quieter than I intend, aimed at the stone rather than through it. "She built it in the back of her workshop. The chimney drew badly, and by midwinter the smoke sat so thick you could taste it in everything she made. The salves, the tinctures, the bands she shaped on the anvil. Everything came out tasting of smoke, and she said that was how you knew it was hers."
The silence on the other side deepens into attention, and I know he’s listening the way I know the whetstone's rhythm and the weight of his boots and the way his breathing changes when he’s awake and thinking about me. Because he does think about me. Through the wall, in the dark, in the space between the whetstone strokes that have not started tonight because he is listening instead of sharpening, the man who looked at my mouth in the forge is thinking about me, and I’m pressing my palm against stone and telling him things I have no tactical reason to tell him.
"She taught me that metal holds heat long after the fire dies." My hand presses harder. The stone underneath is steady and fed by his fire, and the heat travels through the rock into my skin. "That you can shape it, and cool it, and set it aside for days, and the heat stays in the grain. You can feel it if you press your hand to the surface. The memory of the fire, trapped in the metal."
I don’t know why I’m telling him this. I don’t know why it matters that the silence on his side of the stone feels like listening rather than absence, or why my wolf is pressing toward the wall the way a caged thing presses toward the only source of heat it can reach.
I know that the compound thins another fraction with every breath I pull through the chimney's shared air.
I know that the forge took something from me today that I do not have the strength to rebuild: the careful fiction that the heat in my belly when he stands too close is a threat response and not something else entirely. Something I still don’t have a word for. Something that’s starting to feel less like a fire I walked too close to and more like a fire I’m building with my own hands, coal by coal, breath by breath, palm pressed to warm stone while a man who should be my enemy listens to me talk about my dead mother's forge and doesn’t say a word and doesn’t move away from the wall.
Metal holds heat long after the fire dies. I’m learning, with my hand on the stone and his silence filling the dark, that I hold heat too.
8
TORBEN
The debriefing begins the way they all begin: I bring the meal, she sits across from me at the table in my quarters, and we negotiate while the food goes cold between us.
She gave me a supply cache location during our last meal. The intel checked out. One piece, carefully chosen, a door cracked open rather than thrown wide. She’s cooperating on her own terms, and her terms are better-crafted than most treaties I’ve read.
"The relay sat here." She taps a ridge line on the map I’ve spread between the bread and the water pitcher. A grey smudge of forge soot marks the edge of her smallest finger, and my gaze snags on it before I can redirect. "Above the tree line, with sightlines to the northern and eastern approaches. Chosen for visibility, not defensibility. A patrol of four could take it without casualties if they approached from the southern drainage."
"Why give me this one?"
"Because it’s useless to the faction and useful to you, and every useful piece of intelligence I provide extends the timeline that keeps Grimnir's name on Stellan's desk instead of on atreaty." The scarred eyebrow lifts. "I’m cooperating. You might consider acknowledging that."
"I acknowledge it."
"You acknowledge it the way you acknowledge weather. Present but unremarkable."
The corner of my mouth moves before I can stop it, and she sees the delay.
"Your cooperation is noted and appreciated."
"Noted and appreciated." She tears a piece of bread without looking at it. "I’ll have that engraved on whatever headstone this captivity eventually produces."
"You‘re not dying."
"Not yet. But the accommodations do tend toward the funereal." She glances at the food between us. "Although I will concede that the fish was an improvement. Whoever told the kitchen I prefer it over venison has a talent for intelligence gathering."
"Eat your fish."
"I’ve been eating my fish. Every morning. Provided by a captor who monitors my dietary preferences and adjusts my meals accordingly." She picks up a piece and puts it in her mouth, and the look she gives me while she chews carries enough subtext to fill a dispatch. "The Northern Pack's interrogation techniques are surprisingly domestic."
"We are thorough."
