Page 26 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"You choose the escort. I choose the wolves I speak with."
"Done."
We finish the meal in the charged quiet that has replaced conversation since the scent slip. He eats with his wrapped hands and doesn’t wince when the linen catches on the bread, and I eat my fish and don’t comment on the way his gaze keeps dropping to the hollow of my throat and pulling away. When the food is gone, he walks me back to my room with his hand on my arm, the grip careful and brief, and tells me to be ready after midday.
The escort arrives when the sun clears the eastern tower. A Northern Pack wolf named Brenna, a compact woman with braided hair and an axe strapped across her back who looks like she could split me in half and might enjoy the exercise. She walks two paces behind me through the fortress corridors with the relaxed watchfulness of a wolf who has nothing to prove and everything to observe.
The eastern barracks smell like too many wolves in too small a space. The air is thick with body heat and the stale scent of captivity that I recognize from the room I occupied before Torben moved me next to his own quarters. My wolves are here. My responsibility. The wolves I led through the mountains and lost in the timber when the Northern Pack came through the trees and took us apart.
Halvor sees me first.
He is on his feet before I am through the door, crossing the barracks in three strides with the coiled energy of a wolf who has been caged too long and is looking for a direction to aim. He’s young, the youngest wolf I pulled from Blackridge, and the muscles in his arms carry the tension of a body that wants to fight everything it can’t fix.
"Revna." He grabs my arm, then drops it when Brenna's hand moves to her axe. "When are we getting out?"
"You're not getting out. You're being integrated."
"Integrated." He spits the word. "They killed Korren. They took our territory. They put us in a barracks like livestock, and you want us to integrate?"
"I want you to survive. Integration is what survival looks like when the alternative is being traded to a neighboring pack whose reputation for handling captives makes this barracks look like hospitality."
The threat is vague enough to be deniable and specific enough to land. Halvor's jaw tightens, and the fight in his eyes dims enough to let the fear show through. He's young enough that the fear is still visible when it surfaces, and the visibility is both his weakness and his saving grace, because a wolf who can still show fear is a wolf who hasn't hardened past the point of reason.
"Korren would never have surrendered..."
"Which is why Korren is dead. You're alive; I'm alive; and the rest of the wolves in this barracks are alive. My job is to keep it that way, and keeping it that way requires cooperation with the wolves who were the victors and who hold the keys."
"Cooperation." His voice drops. "Is that what you call it? Eating breakfast with the Wolf Prince and walking his corridors without chains?"
The accusation sits in the air between us. He's asking whether I've been bought, and the asking is fair, because from his side of the barracks wall, the captive who eats fish with her captor and walks the fortress with an unlocked door looks like a wolf who has traded loyalty for comfort. The fact that Torben's scent is still warm in the back of my throat from breakfast doesn't help my case.
"I call it strategy," I say. "And the strategy is keeping us alive and together instead of scattered across the territory of whichever alpha decides we're worth collecting. You're welcome to develop a better one. I'll wait."
Halvor holds my gaze for a long moment, and whatever he sees in it settles him enough to unclench his fists. He steps back. He doesn't apologize. Wolves his age don't apologize. They recalibrate, and the recalibration is visible in the way his shoulders drop and his breathing slows.
Erla finds me near the back wall while Halvor is occupied arguing with another young wolf about ration portions.
She is older than my mother was, with iron-grey hair pulled tight against her skull and hands that carry the stiffness of a wolf whose joints have been predicting weather for longer than I have been alive. She was my mother's closest friend. She is the only wolf in this barracks who knows what I am.
"You look thin," she says.
"Everyone looks thin. The rations are not generous."
"The rations aren’t what is thinning you." She takes my wrist and turns it, studying the skin the way a healer studies a patient, and her fingers press against the pulse point with professional precision. "Your scent is changing. The compound is losing ground faster than the dosage should allow."
"I know."
"Do you know why?"
"I've got a theory."
"Your theory has a name. I can smell him on you, Revna. You walk in here with his scent layered over yours so thick that the compound barely registers underneath. Whatever wolf they've got you living near, his pheromones are doing to your compound what a river does to a sandbank." She releases my wrist. "How many doses do you have left?"
"Enough."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer I've got."
